After that one calling of her name Alan’s voice was dead, and he made
no movement. He could not disbelieve. It was not a mental illusion or a
temporary upsetting of his sanity. It was truth. The shock of it was
rending every nerve in his body, even as he stood as if carved out of
wood. And then a strange relaxation swept over him. Some force seemed
to pass out of his flesh, and his arms hung limp. She was there,
_alive!_ He could see the whiteness leave her face and a flush of color
come into it, and he heard a little cry as she jumped down from the log
and came toward him. It had all happened in a few seconds, but it
seemed a long time to Alan.
He saw nothing about her or beyond her. It was as if she were floating
up to him out of the cold mists of the sea. And she stopped only a step
away from him, when she saw more clearly what was in his face. It must
have been something that startled her. Vaguely he realized this and
made an effort to recover himself.
“You almost frightened me,” she said. “We have been expecting you and
watching for you, and I was out there a few minutes ago looking back
over the tundra. The sun was in my eyes, and I didn’t see you.”
It seemed incredible that he should be hearing her voice, the same
voice, unexcited, sweet, and thrilling, speaking as if she had seen him
yesterday and with a certain reserved gladness was welcoming him again
today. It was impossible for him to realize in these moments the
immeasurable distance that lay between their viewpoints. He was simply
Alan Holt—she was the dead risen to life. Many times in his grief he
had visualized what he would do if some miracle could bring her back to
him like this; he had thought of taking her in his arms and never
letting her go. But now that the miracle had come to pass, and she was
within his reach, he stood without moving, trying only to speak.
“You—Mary Standish!” he said at last. “I thought—”
He did not finish. It was not himself speaking. It was another
individual within him, a detached individual trying to explain his lack
of physical expression. He wanted to cry out his gladness, to shout
with joy, yet the directing soul of action in him was stricken. She
touched his arm hesitatingly.
“I didn’t think you would care,” she said. “I thought you wouldn’t
mind—if I came up here.”
Care! The word was like an explosion setting things loose in his brain,
and the touch of her hand sent a sweep of fire through him. He heard
himself cry out, a strange, unhuman sort of cry, as he swept her to his
breast. He held her close, crushing kisses upon her mouth, his fingers
buried in her hair, her slender body almost broken in his arms. She was
alive—she had come back to him—and he forgot everything in these blind
moments but that great truth which was sweeping over him in a glorious
inundation. Then, suddenly, he found that she was fighting him,
struggling to free herself and putting her hands against his face in
her efforts. She was so close that he seemed to see nothing but her
eyes, and in them he did not see what he had dreamed of finding—but
horror. It was a stab that went into his heart, and his arms relaxed.
She staggered back, trembling and swaying a little as she got her
breath, her face very white.
He had hurt her. The hurt was in her eyes, in the way she looked at
him, as if he had become a menace from which she would run if he had
not taken the strength from her. As she stood there, her parted lips
showing the red of his kisses, her shining hair almost undone, he held
out his hands mutely.
“You think—I came here for _that?_” she panted.
“No,” he said. “Forgive me. I am sorry.”
It was not anger that he saw in her face. It was, instead, a mingling
of shock and physical hurt; a measurement of him now, as she looked at
him, which recalled her to him as she had stood that night with her
back against his cabin door. Yet he was not trying to piece things
together. Even subconsciously that was impossible, for all life in him
was centered in the one stupendous thought that she was not dead, but
living, and he did not wonder why. There was no question in his mind as
to the manner in which she had been saved from the sea. He felt a
weakness in his limbs; he wanted to laugh, to cry out, to give himself
up to strange inclinations for a moment or two, like a woman. Such was
the shock of his happiness. It crept in a living fluid through his
flesh. She saw it in the swift change of the rock-like color in his
face, and his quicker breathing, and was a little amazed, but Alan was
too completely possessed by the one great thing to discover the
astonishment growing in her eyes.
“You are alive,” he said, giving voice again to the one thought
pounding in his brain. “_Alive!_”
It seemed to him that word wanted to utter itself an impossible number
of times. Then the truth that was partly dawning came entirely to the
girl.
“Mr. Holt, you did not receive my letter at Nome?” she asked.
“Your letter? At Nome?” He repeated the words, shaking his head. “No.”
“And all this time—you have been thinking—I was dead?”
He nodded, because the thickness in his throat made it the easier form
of speech.
“I wrote you there,” she said. “I wrote the letter before I jumped into
the sea. It went to Nome with Captain Rifle’s ship.”
“I didn’t get it.”
“You didn’t get it?” There was wonderment in her voice, and then, if he
had observed it, understanding.
“Then you didn’t mean that just now? You didn’t intend to do it? It was
because you had blamed yourself for my death, and it was a great relief
to find me alive. That was it, wasn’t it?”
Stupidly he nodded again. “Yes, it was a great relief.”
“You see, I had faith in you even when you wouldn’t help me,” she went
on. “So much faith that I trusted you with my secret in the letter I
wrote. To all the world but you I am dead—to Rossland, Captain Rifle,
everyone. In my letter I told you I had arranged with the young
Thlinkit Indian. He smuggled the canoe over the side just before I
leaped in, and picked me up. I am a good swimmer. Then he paddled me
ashore while the boats were making their search.”
In a moment she had placed a gulf between them again, on the other side
of which she stood unattainable. It was inconceivable that only a few
moments ago he had crushed her in his arms. The knowledge that he had
done this thing, and that she was looking at him now as if it had never
happened, filled him with a smothering sense of humiliation. She made
it impossible for him to speak about it, even to apologize more fully.
“Now I am here,” she was saying in a quiet, possessive sort of way. “I
didn’t think of coming when I jumped into the sea. I made up my mind
afterward. I think it was because I met a little man with red whiskers
whom you once pointed out to me in the smoking salon on the _Nome_. And
so—I am your guest, Mr. Holt.”
There was not the slightest suspicion of apology in her voice as she
smoothed back her hair where he had crumpled it. It was as if she
belonged here, and had always belonged here, and was giving him
permission to enter her domain. Shock was beginning to pass away from
him, and he could feel his feet upon the earth once more. His
spirit-visions of her as she had walked hand in hand with him during
the past weeks, her soft eyes filled with love, faded away before the
reality of Mary Standish in flesh and blood, her quiet mastery of
things, her almost omniscient unapproachableness. He reached out his
hands, but there was a different light in his eyes, and she placed her
own in them confidently.
“It was like a bolt of lightning,” he said, his voice free at last and
trembling. “Day and night I have been thinking of you, dreaming of you,
and cursing myself because I believed I had killed you. And now I find
you alive. And _here!_”
She was so near that the hands he clasped lay against his breast. But
reason had returned to him, and he saw the folly of dreams.
“It is difficult to believe. Out there I thought I was sick. Perhaps I
am. But if I am not sick, and you are really you, I am glad. If I wake
up and find I have imagined it all, as I imagined so many of the other
things—”
He laughed, freeing her hands and looking into eyes shining half out of
tears at him. But he did not finish. She drew away from him, with a
lingering of her finger-tips on his arm, and the little heart-beat in
her throat revealed itself clearly again as on that night in his cabin.
“I have been thinking of you back there, every hour, every step,” he
said, making a gesture toward the tundras over which he had come. “Then
I heard the firecrackers and saw the flag. It is almost as if I had
created you!”
A quick answer was on her lips, but she stopped it.
“And when I found you here, and you didn’t fade away like a ghost, I
thought something was wrong with my head. Something must have been
wrong, I guess, or I wouldn’t have done _that_. You see, it puzzled me
that a ghost should be setting off firecrackers—and I suppose that was
the first impulse I had of making sure you were real.”
A voice came from the edge of the cottonwoods beyond them. It was a
clear, wild voice with a sweet trill in it. “_Maa-rie!_” it called.
“_Maa-rie!_”
“Supper,” nodded the girl. “You are just in time. And then we are going
home in the twilight.”
It made his heart thump, that casual way in which she spoke of his
place as home. She went ahead of him, with the sun glinting in the soft
coils of her hair, and he picked up his rifle and followed, eyes and
soul filled only with the beauty of her slim figure—a glory of life
where for a long time he had fashioned a spirit of the dead. They came
into an open, soft with grass and strewn with flowers, and in this open
a man was kneeling beside a fire no larger than his two hands, and at
his side, watching him, stood a girl with two braids of black hair
rippling down her back. It was Nawadlook who turned first and saw who
it was with Mary Standish, and from his right came an odd little
screech that only one person in the world could make, and that was
Keok. She dropped the armful of sticks she had gathered for the fire
and made straight for him, while Nawadlook, taller and less like a wild
creature in the manner of her coming, was only a moment behind. And
then he was shaking hands with Stampede, and Keok had slipped down
among the flowers and was crying. That was like Keok. She always cried
when he went away, and cried when he returned; and then, in another
moment, it was Keok who was laughing first, and Alan noticed she no
longer wore her hair in braids, as the quieter Nawadlook persisted in
doing, but had it coiled about her head just as Mary Standish wore her
own.
These details pressed themselves upon him in a vague and unreal sort of
way. No one, not even Mary Standish, could understand how his mind and
nerves were fighting to recover themselves. His senses were swimming
back one by one to a vital point from which they had been swept by an
unexpected sea, gripping rather incoherently at unimportant realities
as they assembled themselves. In the edge of the tundra beyond the
cottonwoods he noticed three saddle-deer grazing at the ends of ropes
which were fastened to cotton-tufted nigger-heads. He drew off his pack
as Mary Standish went to help Keok pick up the fallen sticks. Nawadlook
was pulling a coffee-pot from the tiny fire. Stampede began to fill a
pipe. He realized that because they had expected him, if not today then
tomorrow or the next day or a day soon after that, no one had
experienced shock but himself, and with a mighty effort he reached back
and dragged the old Alan Holt into existence again. It was like
bringing an intelligence out of darkness into light.
It was difficult for him—afterward—to remember just what happened
during the next half-hour. The amazing thing was that Mary Standish sat
opposite him, with the cloth on which Nawadlook had spread the supper
things between them, and that she was the same clear-eyed, beautiful
Mary Standish who had sat across the table from him in the dining-salon
of the _Nome_.
Not until later, when he stood alone with Stampede Smith in the edge of
the cottonwoods, and the three girls were riding deer back over the
tundra in the direction of the Range, did the sea of questions which
had been gathering begin to sweep upon him. It had been Keok’s
suggestion that she and Mary and Nawadlook ride on ahead, and he had
noticed how quickly Mary Standish had caught at the idea. She had
smiled at him as she left, and a little farther out had waved her hand
at him, as Keok and Nawadlook both had done, but not another word had
passed between them alone. And as they rode off in the warm glow of
sunset Alan stood watching them, and would have stared without speech
until they were out of sight, if Stampede’s fingers had not gripped his
arm.
“Now, go to it, Alan,” he said. “I’m ready. Give me hell!”