The latter part of September Carley returned to New York.
Soon after her arrival she received by letter a formal proposal of
marriage from Elbert Harrington, who had been quietly attentive to her
during her sojourn at Lake Placid. He was a lawyer of distinction,
somewhat older than most of her friends, and a man of means and fine
family. Carley was quite surprised. Harrington was really one of the
few of her acquaintances whom she regarded as somewhat behind the
times, and liked him the better for that. But she could not marry him,
and replied to his letter in as kindly a manner as possible. Then he
called personally.
“Carley, I’ve come to ask you to reconsider,” he said, with a smile in
his gray eyes. He was not a tall or handsome man, but he had what women
called a nice strong face.
“Elbert, you embarrass me,” she replied, trying to laugh it out.
“Indeed I feel honored, and I thank you. But I can’t marry you.”
“Why not?” he asked, quietly.
“Because I don’t love you,” she replied.
“I did not expect you to,” he said. “I hoped in time you might come to
care. I’ve known you a good many years, Carley. Forgive me if I tell
you I see you are breaking—wearing yourself down. Maybe it is not a
husband you need so much now, but you do need a home and children. You
are wasting your life.”
“All you say may be true, my friend,” replied Carley, with a helpless
little upflinging of hands. “Yet it does not alter my feelings.”
“But you will marry sooner or later?” he queried, persistently.
This straightforward question struck Carley as singularly as if it was
one she might never have encountered. It forced her to think of things
she had buried.
“I don’t believe I ever will,” she answered, thoughtfully.
“That is nonsense, Carley,” he went on. “You’ll have to marry. What
else can you do? With all due respect to your feelings—that affair with
Kilbourne is ended—and you’re not the wishy-washy heartbreak kind of a
girl.”
“You can never tell what a woman will do,” she said, somewhat coldly.
“Certainly not. That’s why I refuse to take no. Carley, be reasonable.
You like me—respect me, do you not?”
“Why, of course I do!”
“I’m only thirty-five, and I could give you all any sensible woman
wants,” he said. “Let’s make a real American home. Have you thought at
all about that, Carley? Something is wrong today. Men are not marrying.
Wives are not having children. Of all the friends I have, not one has a
real American home. Why, it is a terrible fact! But, Carley, you are
not a sentimentalist, or a melancholiac. Nor are you a waster. You have
fine qualities. You need something to do, some one to care for.”
“Pray do not think me ungrateful, Elbert,” she replied, “nor insensible
to the truth of what you say. But my answer is no!”
When Harrington had gone Carley went to her room, and precisely as upon
her return from Arizona she faced her mirror skeptically and
relentlessly. “I am such a liar that I’ll do well to look at myself,”
she meditated. “Here I am again. Now! The world expects me to marry.
But _what_ do I expect?”
There was a raw unheated wound in Carley’s heart. Seldom had she
permitted herself to think about it, let alone to probe it with hard
materialistic queries. But custom to her was as inexorable as life. If
she chose to live in the world she must conform to its customs. For a
woman marriage was the aim and the end and the all of existence.
Nevertheless, for Carley it could not be without love. Before she had
gone West she might have had many of the conventional modern ideas
about women and marriage. But because out there in the wilds her love
and perception had broadened, now her arraignment of herself and her
sex was bigger, sterner, more exacting. The months she had been home
seemed fuller than all the months of her life. She had tried to forget
and enjoy; she had not succeeded; but she had looked with far-seeing
eyes at her world. Glenn Kilbourne’s tragic fate had opened her eyes.
Either the world was all wrong or the people in it were. But if that
were an extravagant and erroneous supposition, there certainly was
proof positive that her own small individual world was wrong. The women
did not do any real work; they did not bear children; they lived on
excitement and luxury. They had no ideals. How greatly were men to
blame? Carley doubted her judgment here. But as men could not live
without the smiles and comradeship and love of women, it was only
natural that they should give the women what they wanted. Indeed, they
had no choice. It was give or go without. How much of real love entered
into the marriages among her acquaintances? Before marriage Carley
wanted a girl to be sweet, proud, aloof, with a heart of golden fire.
Not attainable except through love! It would be better that no children
be born at all unless born of such beautiful love. Perhaps that was why
so few children were born. Nature’s balance and revenge! In Arizona
Carley had learned something of the ruthlessness and inevitableness of
nature. She was finding out she had learned this with many other
staggering facts.
“I love Glenn still,” she whispered, passionately, with trembling lips,
as she faced the tragic-eyed image of herself in the mirror. “I love
him more—more. Oh, my God! If I were honest I’d cry out the truth! It
is terrible. ... I will always love him. How then could I marry any
other man? I would be a lie, a cheat. If I could only forget him—only
kill that love. Then I might love another man—and if I did love him—no
matter what I had felt or done before, I would be worthy. I could feel
worthy. I could give him just as much. But without such love I’d give
only a husk—a body without soul.”
Love, then, was the sacred and holy flame of life that sanctioned the
begetting of children. Marriage might be a necessity of modern time,
but it was not the vital issue. Carley’s anguish revealed strange and
hidden truths. In some inexplicable way Nature struck a terrible
balance—revenged herself upon a people who had no children, or who
brought into the world children not created by the divinity of love,
unyearned for, and therefore somehow doomed to carry on the blunders
and burdens of life.
Carley realized how right and true it might be for her to throw herself
away upon an inferior man, even a fool or a knave, if she loved him
with that great and natural love of woman; likewise it dawned upon her
how false and wrong and sinful it would be to marry the greatest or the
richest or the noblest man unless she had that supreme love to give
him, and knew it was reciprocated.
“What am I going to do with my life?” she asked, bitterly and aghast.
“I have been—I am a waster. I’ve lived for nothing but pleasurable
sensation. I’m utterly useless. I do absolutely no good on earth.”
Thus she saw how Harrington’s words rang true—how they had precipitated
a crisis for which her unconscious brooding had long made preparation.
“Why not give up ideals and be like the rest of my kind?” she
soliloquized.
That was one of the things which seemed wrong with modern life. She
thrust the thought from her with passionate scorn. If poor, broken,
ruined Glenn Kilbourne could cling to an ideal and fight for it, could
not she, who had all the world esteemed worth while, be woman enough to
do the same? The direction of her thought seemed to have changed. She
had been ready for rebellion. Three months of the old life had shown
her that for her it was empty, vain, farcical, without one redeeming
feature. The naked truth was brutal, but it cut clean to wholesome
consciousness. Such so-called social life as she had plunged into
deliberately to forget her unhappiness had failed her utterly. If she
had been shallow and frivolous it might have done otherwise. Stripped
of all guise, her actions must have been construed by a penetrating and
impartial judge as a mere parading of her decorated person before a
number of males with the purpose of ultimate selection.
“I’ve got to find some work,” she muttered, soberly.
At the moment she heard the postman’s whistle outside; and a little
later the servant brought up her mail. The first letter, large, soiled,
thick, bore the postmark Flagstaff, and her address in Glenn
Kilbourne’s writing.
Carley stared at it. Her heart gave a great leap. Her hand shook. She
sat down suddenly as if the strength of her legs was inadequate to
uphold her.
“Glenn has—written me!” she whispered, in slow, halting realization.
“For what? Oh, why?”
The other letters fell off her lap, to lie unnoticed. This big thick
envelope fascinated her. It was one of the stamped envelopes she had
seen in his cabin. It contained a letter that had been written on his
rude table, before the open fire, in the light of the doorway, in that
little log-cabin under the spreading pines of West Ford Canyon. Dared
she read it? The shock to her heart passed; and with mounting swell,
seemingly too full for her breast, it began to beat and throb a wild
gladness through all her being. She tore the envelope apart and read:
DEAR CARLEY:
I’m surely glad for a good excuse to write you.
Once in a blue moon I get a letter, and today Hutter brought me one
from a soldier pard of mine who was with me in the Argonne. His name is
Virgil Rust—queer name, don’t you think?—and he’s from Wisconsin. Just
a rough-diamond sort of chap, but fairly well educated. He and I were
in some pretty hot places, and it was he who pulled me out of a shell
crater. I’d “gone west” sure then if it hadn’t been for Rust.
Well, he did all sorts of big things during the war. Was down several
times with wounds. He liked to fight and he was a holy terror. We all
thought he’d get medals and promotion. But he didn’t get either. These
much-desired things did not always go where they were best deserved.
Rust is now lying in a hospital in Bedford Park. His letter is pretty
blue. All he says about why he’s there is that he’s knocked out. But he
wrote a heap about his girl. It seems he was in love with a girl in his
home town—a pretty, big-eyed lass whose picture I’ve seen—and while he
was overseas she married one of the chaps who got out of fighting.
Evidently Rust is deeply hurt. He wrote: “I’d not care so... if she’d
thrown me down to marry an old man or a boy who couldn’t have gone to
war.” You see, Carley, service men feel queer about that sort of thing.
It’s something we got over there, and none of us will ever outlive it.
Now, the point of this is that I am asking you to go see Rust, and
cheer him up, and do what you can for the poor devil. It’s a good deal
to ask of you, I know, especially as Rust saw _your_ picture many a
time and knows you were my girl. But you needn’t tell him that you—we
couldn’t make a go of it.
And, as I am writing this to you, I see no reason why I shouldn’t go on
in behalf of myself.
The fact is, Carley, I miss writing to you more than I miss anything of
my old life. I’ll bet you have a trunkful of letters from me—unless
you’ve destroyed them. I’m not going to say how I miss _your_ letters.
But I will say you wrote the most charming and fascinating letters of
anyone I ever knew, quite aside from any sentiment. You knew, of
course, that I had no other girl correspondent. Well, I got along
fairly well before you came West, but I’d be an awful liar if I denied
I didn’t get lonely for you and your letters. It’s different now that
you’ve been to Oak Creek. I’m alone most of the time and I dream a lot,
and I’m afraid I see you here in my cabin, and along the brook, and
under the pines, and riding Calico—which you came to do well—and on my
hogpen fence—and, oh, everywhere! I don’t want you to think I’m down in
the mouth, for I’m not. I’ll take my medicine. But, Carley, you spoiled
me, and I miss hearing from you, and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be all
right for you to send me a friendly letter occasionally.
It is autumn now. I wish you could see Arizona canyons in their
gorgeous colors. We have had frost right along and the mornings are
great. There’s a broad zigzag belt of gold halfway up the San Francisco
peaks, and that is the aspen thickets taking on their fall coat. Here
in the canyon you’d think there was blazing fire everywhere. The vines
and the maples are red, scarlet, carmine, cerise, magenta, all the hues
of flame. The oak leaves are turning russet gold, and the sycamores are
yellow green. Up on the desert the other day I rode across a patch of
asters, lilac and lavender, almost purple. I had to get off and pluck a
handful. And then what do you think? I dug up the whole bunch, roots
and all, and planted them on the sunny side of my cabin. I rather guess
your love of flowers engendered this remarkable susceptibility in me.
I’m home early most every afternoon now, and I like the couple of hours
loafing around. Guess it’s bad for me, though. You know I seldom hunt,
and the trout in the pool here are so tame now they’ll almost eat out
of my hand. I haven’t the heart to fish for them. The squirrels, too,
have grown tame and friendly. There’s a red squirrel that climbs up on
my table. And there’s a chipmunk who lives in my cabin and runs over my
bed. I’ve a new pet—the little pig you christened Pinky. After he had
the wonderful good fortune to be caressed and named by you I couldn’t
think of letting him grow up in an ordinary piglike manner. So I
fetched him home. My dog, Moze, was jealous at first and did not like
this intrusion, but now they are good friends and sleep together. Flo
has a kitten she’s going to give me, and then, as Hutter says, I’ll be
“Jake.”
My occupation during these leisure hours perhaps would strike my old
friends East as idle, silly, mawkish. But I believe you will understand
me.
I have the pleasure of doing nothing, and of catching now and then a
glimpse of supreme joy in the strange state of _thinking_ nothing.
Tennyson came close to this in his “Lotus Eaters.” Only to see—only to
feel is enough!
Sprawled on the warm sweet pine needles, I breathe through them the
breath of the earth and am somehow no longer lonely. I cannot, of
course, see the sunset, but I watch for its coming on the eastern wall
of the canyon. I see the shadow slowly creep up, driving the gold
before it, until at last the canyon rim and pines are turned to golden
fire. I watch the sailing eagles as they streak across the gold, and
swoop up into the blue, and pass out of sight. I watch the golden flush
fade to gray, and then, the canyon slowly fills with purple shadows.
This hour of twilight is the silent and melancholy one. Seldom is there
any sound save the soft rush of the water over the stones, and that
seems to die away. For a moment, perhaps, I am Hiawatha alone in his
forest home, or a more primitive savage, feeling the great, silent
pulse of nature, happy in unconsciousness, like a beast of the wild.
But only for an instant do I ever catch this fleeting state. Next I am
Glenn Kilbourne of West Fork, doomed and haunted by memories of the
past. The great looming walls then become no longer blank. They are
vast pages of the history of my life, with its past and present, and,
alas! its future. Everything time does is written on the stones. And my
stream seems to murmur the sad and ceaseless flow of human life, with
its music and its misery.
Then, descending from the sublime to the humdrum and necessary, I heave
a sigh, and pull myself together, and go in to make biscuits and fry
ham. But I should not forget to tell you that before I do go in, very
often my looming, wonderful walls and crags weave in strange shadowy
characters the beautiful and unforgettable face of Carley Burch!
I append what little news Oak Creek affords.
That blamed old bald eagle stole another of my pigs.
I am doing so well with my hog-raising that Hutter wants to come in
with me, giving me an interest in his sheep.
It is rumored some one has bought the Deep Lake section I wanted for a
ranch. I don’t know who. Hutter was rather noncommittal.
Charley, the herder, had one of his queer spells the other day, and
swore to me he had a letter from you. He told the blamed lie with a
sincere and placid eye, and even a smile of pride. Queer guy, that
Charley!
Flo and Lee Stanton had another quarrel—the worst yet, Lee tells me.
Flo asked a girl friend out from Flag and threw her in Lee’s way, so to
speak, and when Lee retaliated by making love to the girl Flo got mad.
Funny creatures, you girls! Flo rode with me from High Falls to West
Fork, and never showed the slightest sign of trouble. In fact she was
delightfully gay. She rode Calico, and beat me bad in a race.
_Adios_, Carley. Won’t you write me?
GLENN.
No sooner had Carley read the letter through to the end than she began
it all over again, and on this second perusal she lingered over
passages—only to reread them. That suggestion of her face sculptured by
shadows on the canyon walls seemed to thrill her very soul.
She leaped up from the reading to cry out something that was
unutterable. All the intervening weeks of shame and anguish and fury
and strife and pathos, and the endless striving to forget, were as if
by the magic of a letter made nothing but vain oblations.
“He loves me still!” she whispered, and pressed her breast with
clenching hands, and laughed in wild exultance, and paced her room like
a caged lioness. It was as if she had just awakened to the assurance
she was beloved. That was the shibboleth—the cry by which she sounded
the closed depths of her love and called to the stricken life of a
woman’s insatiate vanity.
Then she snatched up the letter, to scan it again, and, suddenly
grasping the import of Glenn’s request, she hurried to the telephone to
find the number of the hospital in Bedford Park. A nurse informed her
that visitors were received at certain hours and that any attention to
disabled soldiers was most welcome.
Carley motored out there to find the hospital merely a long one-story
frame structure, a barracks hastily thrown up for the care of invalided
men of the service. The chauffeur informed her that it had been used
for that purpose during the training period of the army, and later when
injured soldiers began to arrive from France.
A nurse admitted Carley into a small bare anteroom. Carley made known
her errand.
“I’m glad it’s Rust you want to see,” replied the nurse. “Some of these
boys are going to die. And some will be worse off if they live. But
Rust may get well if he’ll only behave. You are a relative—or friend?”
“I don’t know him,” answered Carley. “But I have a friend who was with
him in France.”
The nurse led Carley into a long narrow room with a line of single beds
down each side, a stove at each end, and a few chairs. Each bed
appeared to have an occupant and those nearest Carley lay singularly
quiet. At the far end of the room were soldiers on crutches, wearing
bandages on their beads, carrying their arms in slings. Their merry
voices contrasted discordantly with their sad appearance.
Presently Carley stood beside a bed and looked down upon a gaunt,
haggard young man who lay propped up on pillows.
“Rust—a lady to see you,” announced the nurse.
Carley had difficulty in introducing herself. Had Glenn ever looked
like this? What a face! It’s healed scar only emphasized the pallor and
furrows of pain that assuredly came from present wounds. He had
unnaturally bright dark eyes, and a flush of fever in his hollow
cheeks.
“How do!” he said, with a wan smile. “Who’re you?”
“I’m Glenn Kilbourne’s fiancée,” she replied, holding out her hand.
“Say, I ought to’ve known you,” he said, eagerly, and a warmth of light
changed the gray shade of his face. “You’re the girl Carley! You’re
almost like my—my own girl. By golly! You’re some looker! It was good
of you to come. Tell me about Glenn.”
Carley took the chair brought by the nurse, and pulling it close to the
bed, she smiled down upon him and said: “I’ll be glad to tell you all I
know—presently. But first you tell me about yourself. Are you in pain?
What is your trouble? You must let me do everything I can for you, and
these other men.”
Carley spent a poignant and depth-stirring hour at the bedside of
Glenn’s comrade. At last she learned from loyal lips the nature of
Glenn Kilbourne’s service to his country. How Carley clasped to her
sore heart the praise of the man she loved—the simple proofs of his
noble disregard of self! Rust said little about his own service to
country or to comrade. But Carley saw enough in his face. He had been
like Glenn. By these two Carley grasped the compelling truth of the
spirit and sacrifice of the legion of boys who had upheld American
traditions. Their children and their children’s children, as the years
rolled by into the future, would hold their heads higher and prouder.
Some things could never die in the hearts and the blood of a race.
These boys, and the girls who had the supreme glory of being loved by
them, must be the ones to revive the Americanism of their forefathers.
Nature and God would take care of the slackers, the cowards who cloaked
their shame with bland excuses of home service, of disability, and of
dependence.
Carley saw two forces in life—the destructive and constructive. On the
one side greed, selfishness, materialism: on the other generosity,
sacrifice, and idealism. Which of them builded for the future? She saw
men as wolves, sharks, snakes, vermin, and opposed to them men as lions
and eagles. She saw women who did not inspire men to fare forth to
seek, to imagine, to dream, to hope, to work, to fight. She began to
have a glimmering of what a woman might be.
That night she wrote swiftly and feverishly, page after page, to Glenn,
only to destroy what she had written. She could not keep her heart out
of her words, nor a hint of what was becoming a sleepless and eternal
regret. She wrote until a late hour, and at last composed a letter she
knew did not ring true, so stilted and restrained was it in all
passages save those concerning news of Glenn’s comrade and of her own
friends. “I’ll never—never write him again,” she averred with stiff
lips, and next moment could have laughed in mockery at the bitter
truth. If she had ever had any courage, Glenn’s letter had destroyed
it. But had it not been a kind of selfish, false courage, roused to
hide her hurt, to save her own future? Courage should have a thought of
others. Yet shamed one moment at the consciousness she would write
Glenn again and again, and exultant the next with the clamouring love,
she seemed to have climbed beyond the self that had striven to forget.
She would remember and think though she died of longing.
Carley, like a drowning woman, caught at straws. What a relief and joy
to give up that endless nagging at her mind! For months she had kept
ceaselessly active, by associations which were of no help to her and
which did not make her happy, in her determination to forget. Suddenly
then she gave up to remembrance. She would cease trying to get over her
love for Glenn, and think of him and dream about him as much as memory
dictated. This must constitute the only happiness she could have.
The change from strife to surrender was so novel and sweet that for
days she felt renewed. It was augmented by her visits to the hospital
in Bedford Park. Through her bountiful presence Virgil Rust and his
comrades had many dull hours of pain and weariness alleviated and
brightened. Interesting herself in the condition of the seriously
disabled soldiers and possibility of their future took time and work
Carley gave willingly and gladly. At first she endeavored to get
acquaintances with means and leisure to help the boys, but these
overtures met with such little success that she quit wasting valuable
time she could herself devote to their interests.
Thus several weeks swiftly passed by. Several soldiers who had been
more seriously injured than Rust improved to the extent that they were
discharged. But Rust gained little or nothing. The nurse and doctor
both informed Carley that Rust brightened for her, but when she was
gone he lapsed into somber indifference. He did not care whether he ate
or not, or whether he got well or died.
“If I do pull out, where’ll I go and what’ll I do?” he once asked the
nurse.
Carley knew that Rust’s hurt was more than loss of a leg, and she
decided to talk earnestly to him and try to win him to hope and effort.
He had come to have a sort of reverence for her. So, biding her time,
she at length found opportunity to approach his bed while his comrades
were asleep or out of hearing. He endeavored to laugh her off, and then
tried subterfuge, and lastly he cast off his mask and let her see his
naked soul.
“Carley, I don’t want your money or that of your kind friends—whoever
they are—you say will help me to get into business,” he said. “God
knows I thank you and it warms me inside to find _some one_ who
appreciates what I’ve given. But I don’t want charity.... And I guess
I’m pretty sick of the game. I’m sorry the Boches didn’t do the job
right.”
“Rust, that is morbid talk,” replied Carley. “You’re ill and you just
can’t see any hope. You must cheer up—fight _yourself;_ and look at the
brighter side. It’s a horrible pity you must be a cripple, but Rust,
indeed life can be worth living if you make it so.”
“How could there be a brighter side when a man’s only half a man—” he
queried, bitterly.
“You can be just as much a man as ever,” persisted Carley, trying to
smile when she wanted to cry.
“Could you care for a man with only one leg?” he asked, deliberately.
“What a question! Why, of course I could!”
“Well, maybe you are different. Glenn always swore even if he was
killed no slacker or no rich guy left at home could ever get you. Maybe
you haven’t any idea how much it means to us fellows to know there
_are_ true and faithful girls. But I’ll tell you, Carley, we fellows
who went across got to see things strange when we came home. The good
old U. S. needs a lot of faithful girls just now, believe me.”
“Indeed that’s true,” replied Carley. “It’s a hard time for everybody,
and particularly you boys who have lost so—so much.”
“I lost _all_, except my life—and I wish to God I’d lost that,” he
replied, gloomily.
“Oh, don’t talk so!” implored Carley in distress. “Forgive me, Rust, if
I hurt you. But I must tell you—that—that Glenn wrote me—you’d lost
your girl. Oh, I’m sorry! It is dreadful for you now. But if you got
well—and went to work—and took up life where you left it—why soon your
pain would grow easier. And you’d find some happiness yet.”
“Never for me in this world.”
“But why, Rust, _why?_ You’re no—no—Oh! I mean you have intelligence
and courage. Why isn’t there anything left for you?”
“Because something here’s been killed,” he replied, and put his hand to
his heart.
“Your faith? Your love of—of everything? Did the war kill it?”
“I’d gotten over that, maybe,” he said, drearily, with his somber eyes
on space that seemed lettered for him. “But _she_ half murdered it—and
_they_ did the rest.”
“They? Whom do you mean, Rust?”
“Why, Carley, I mean the people I lost my leg for!” he replied, with
terrible softness.
“The British? The French?” she queried, in bewilderment.
“_No!_” he cried, and turned his face to the wall.
Carley dared not ask him more. She was shocked. How helplessly impotent
all her earnest sympathy! No longer could she feel an impersonal,
however kindly, interest in this man. His last ringing word had linked
her also to his misfortune and his suffering. Suddenly he turned away
from the wall. She saw him swallow laboriously. How tragic that thin,
shadowed face of agony! Carley saw it differently. But for the
beautiful softness of light in his eyes, she would have been unable to
endure gazing longer.
“Carley, I’m bitter,” he said, “but I’m not rancorous and callous, like
some of the boys. I know if you’d been my girl you’d have stuck to me.”
“Yes,” Carley whispered.
“That makes a difference,” he went on, with a sad smile. “You see, we
soldiers all had feelings. And in one thing we all felt alike. That was
we were going to fight for our homes and our women. I should say women
first. No matter what we read or heard about standing by our allies,
fighting for liberty or civilization, the truth was we all felt the
same, even if we never breathed it.... Glenn fought for you. I fought
for Nell.... We were not going to let the Huns treat you as they
treated French and Belgian girls.... And think! Nell was engaged to
me—she _loved_ me—and, by God! She married a slacker when I lay half
dead on the battlefield!”
“She was not worth loving or fighting for,” said Carley, with
agitation.
“Ah! now you’ve said something,” he declared. “If I can only hold to
that truth! What does one girl amount to? _I_ do not count. It is the
sum that counts. We love America—our homes—our women!... Carley, I’ve
had comfort and strength come to me through you. Glenn will have his
reward in your love. Somehow I seem to share it, a little. Poor Glenn!
He got his, too. Why, Carley, that guy wouldn’t _let_ you do what he
could do _for you_. He was cut to pieces—”
“Please—Rust—don’t say any more. I am unstrung,” she pleaded.
“Why not? It’s due you to know how splendid Glenn was.... I tell you,
Carley, all the boys here love you for the way you’ve stuck to Glenn.
Some of them knew him, and I’ve told the rest. We thought he’d never
pull through. But he has, and we know how you helped. Going West to see
him! He didn’t write it to me, but I know.... I’m wise. I’m happy for
him—the lucky dog. Next time you go West—”
“Hush!” cried Carley. She could endure no more. She could no longer be
a lie.
“You’re white—you’re shaking,” exclaimed Rust, in concern. “Oh, I—what
did I say? Forgive me—”
“Rust, I am no more worth loving and fighting for than your Nell.”
“What!” he ejaculated.
“I have not told you the truth,” she said, swiftly. “I have let you
believe a lie.... I shall never marry Glenn. I broke my engagement to
him.”
Slowly Rust sank back upon the pillow, his large luminous eyes
piercingly fixed upon her, as if he would read her soul.
“I went West—yes—” continued Carley. “But it was selfishly. I wanted
Glenn to come back here.... He had suffered as you have. He nearly
died. But he fought—he fought—Oh! he went through hell! And after a
long, slow, horrible struggle he began to mend. He worked. He went to
raising hogs. He lived alone. He worked harder and harder.... The West
and his work saved him, body and soul.... He had learned to love both
the West and his work. I did not blame him. But I could not live out
there. He needed me. But I was too little—too selfish. I could not
marry him. I gave him up. ... I left—him—alone!”
Carley shrank under the scorn in Rust’s eyes.
“And there’s another man,” he said, “a clean, straight, unscarred
fellow who wouldn’t fight!”
“Oh, no—I—I swear there’s not,” whispered Carley.
“You, too,” he replied, thickly. Then slowly he turned that worn dark
face to the wall. His frail breast heaved. And his lean hand made her a
slight gesture of dismissal, significant and imperious.
Carley fled. She could scarcely see to find the car. All her internal
being seemed convulsed, and a deadly faintness made her sick and cold.