It seemed to Alan that in an instant a sudden change had come over the
world. There was silence in the cabin, except for the breath which came
like a sob to the girl’s lips as she turned to the window and looked
out into the blaze of golden sunlight that filled the tundra. He heard
Tautuk’s voice, calling to Keok away over near the reindeer corral, and
he heard clearly Keok’s merry laughter as she answered him. A
gray-cheeked thrush flew up to the roof of Sokwenna’s cabin and began
to sing. It was as if these things had come as a message to both of
them, relieving a tension, and significant of the beauty and glory and
undying hope of life. Mary Standish turned from the window with shining
eyes.
“Every day the thrush comes and sings on our cabin roof,” she said.
“It is—possibly—because you are here,” he replied.
She regarded him seriously. “I have thought of that. You know, I have
faith in a great many unbelievable things. I can think of nothing more
beautiful than the spirit that lives in the heart of a bird. I am sure,
if I were dying, I would like to have a bird singing near me.
Hopelessness cannot be so deep that bird-song will not reach it.”
He nodded, trying to answer in that way. He felt uncomfortable. She
closed the door which he had left partly open, and made a little
gesture for him to resume the chair which he had left a few moments
before. She seated herself first and smiled at him wistfully, half
regretfully, as she said:
“I have been very foolish. What I am going to tell you now I should
have told you aboard the _Nome_. But I was afraid. Now I am not afraid,
but ashamed, terribly ashamed, to let you know the truth. And yet I am
not sorry it happened so, because otherwise I would not have come up
here, and all this—your world, your people, and you—have meant a great
deal to me. You will understand when I have made my confession.”
“No, I don’t want that,” he protested almost roughly. “I don’t want you
to put it that way. If I can help you, and if you wish to tell me as a
friend, that’s different. I don’t want a confession, which would imply
that I have no faith in you.”
“And you have faith in me?”
“Yes; so much that the sun will darken and bird-song never seem the
same if I lose you again, as I thought I had lost you from the ship.”
“Oh, _you mean that_!”
The words came from her in a strange, tense, little cry, and he seemed
to see only her eyes as he looked at her face, pale as the petals of
the tundra daises behind her. With the thrill of what he had dared to
say tugging at his heart, he wondered why she was so white.
“You mean that,” her lips repeated slowly, “after all that has
happened—even after—that part of a letter—which Stampede brought to you
last night—”
He was surprised. How had she discovered what he thought was a secret
between himself and Stampede? His mind leaped to a conclusion, and she
saw it written in his face.
“No, it wasn’t Stampede,” she said. “He didn’t tell me. It—just
happened. And after this letter—you still believe in me?”
“I must. I should be unhappy if I did not. And I am—most perversely
hoping for happiness. I have told myself that what I saw over John
Graham’s signature was a lie.”
“It wasn’t that—quite. But it didn’t refer to you, or to me. It was
part of a letter written to Rossland. He sent me some books while I was
on the ship, and inadvertently left a page of this letter in one of
them as a marker. It was really quite unimportant, when one read the
whole of it. The other half of the page is in the toe of the slipper
which you did not return to Ellen McCormick. You know that is the
conventional thing for a woman to do—to use paper for padding in a
soft-toed slipper.”
He wanted to shout; he wanted to throw up his arms and laugh as Tautuk
and Amuk Toolik and a score of others had laughed to the beat of the
tom-toms last night, not because he was amused, but out of sheer
happiness. But Mary Standish’s voice, continuing in its quiet and
matter-of-fact way, held him speechless, though she could not fail to
see the effect upon him of this simple explanation of the presence of
Graham’s letter.
“I was in Nawadlook’s room when I saw Stampede pick up the wad of paper
from the floor,” she was saying. “I was looking at the slipper a few
minutes before, regretting that you had left its mate in my cabin on
the ship, and the paper must have dropped then. I saw Stampede read it,
and the shock that came in his face. Then he placed it on the table and
went out. I hurried to see what he had found and had scarcely read the
few words when I heard him returning. I returned the paper where he had
laid it, hid myself in Nawadlook’s room, and saw Stampede when he
carried it to you. I don’t know why I allowed it to be done. I had no
reason. Maybe it was just—intuition, and maybe it was because—just in
that hour—I so hated myself that I wanted someone to flay me alive, and
I thought that what Stampede had found would make you do it. And I
deserve it! I deserve nothing better at your hands.”
“But it isn’t true,” he protested. “The letter was to Rossland.”
There was no responsive gladness in her eyes. “Better that it were
true, and all that _is_ true were false,” she said in a quiet, hopeless
voice. “I would almost give my life to be no more than what those words
implied, dishonest, a spy, a criminal of a sort; almost any alternative
would I accept in place of what I actually am. Do you begin to
understand?”
“I am afraid—I can not.” Even as he persisted in denial, the pain which
had grown like velvety dew in her eyes clutched at his heart, and he
felt dread of what lay behind it. “I understand—only—that I am glad you
are here, more glad than yesterday, or this morning, or an hour ago.”
She bowed her head, so that the bright light of day made a radiance of
rich color in her hair, and he saw the sudden tremble of the shining
lashes that lay against her cheeks; and then, quickly, she caught her
breath, and her hands grew steady in her lap.
“Would you mind—if I asked you first—to tell me _your_ story of John
Graham?” she spoke softly. “I know it, a little, but I think it would
make everything easier if I could hear it from you—now.”
He stood up and looked down upon her where she sat, with the light
playing in her hair; and then he moved to the window, and back, and she
had not changed her position, but was waiting for him to speak. She
raised her eyes, and the question her lips had formed was glowing in
them as clearly as if she had voiced it again in words. A desire rose
in him to speak to her as he had never spoken to another human being,
and to reveal for her—and for her alone—the thing that had harbored
itself in his soul for many years. Looking up at him, waiting, partial
understanding softening her sweet face, a dusky glow in her eyes, she
was so beautiful that he cried out softly and then laughed in a strange
repressed sort of way as he half held out his arms toward her.
“I think I know how my father must have loved my mother,” he said. “But
I can’t make you feel it. I can’t hope for that. She died when I was so
young that she remained only as a beautiful dream for me. But for my
father she _never_ died, and as I grew older she became more and more
alive for me, so that in our journeys we would talk about her as if she
were waiting for us back home and would welcome us when we returned.
And never could my father remain away from the place where she was
buried very long at a time. He called it _home_, that little cup at the
foot of the mountain, with the waterfall singing in summer, and a
paradise of birds and flowers keeping her company, and all the great,
wild world she loved about her. There was the cabin, too; the little
cabin where I was born, with its back to the big mountain, and filled
with the handiwork of my mother as she had left it when she died. And
my father too used to laugh and sing there—he had a clear voice that
would roll half-way up the mountain; and as I grew older the miracle at
times stirred me with a strange fear, so real to my father did my dead
mother seem when he was home. But you look frightened, Miss Standish!
Oh, it may seem weird and ghostly now, but it was _true_—so true that I
have lain awake nights thinking of it and wishing that it had never
been so!”
“Then you have wished a great sin,” said the girl in a voice that
seemed scarcely to whisper between her parted lips. “I hope someone
will feel toward me—some day—like that.”
“But it was this which brought the tragedy, the thing you have asked me
to tell you about,” he said, unclenching his hands slowly, and then
tightening them again until the blood ebbed from their veins.
“Interests were coming in; the tentacles of power and greed were
reaching out, encroaching steadily a little nearer to our cup at the
foot of the mountain. But my father did not dream of what might happen.
It came in the spring of the year he took me on my first trip to the
States, when I was eighteen. We were gone five months, and they were
five months of hell for him. Day and night he grieved for my mother and
the little home under the mountain. And when at last we came back—”
He turned again to the window, but he did not see the golden sun of the
tundra or hear Tautuk calling from the corral.
“When we came back,” he repeated in a cold, hard voice, “a construction
camp of a hundred men had invaded my father’s little paradise. The
cabin was gone; a channel had been cut from the waterfall, and this
channel ran where my mother’s grave had been. They had treated it with
that same desecration with which they have destroyed ten thousand
Indian graves since then. Her bones were scattered in the sand and mud.
And from the moment my father saw what had happened, never another sun
rose in the heavens for him. His heart died, yet he went on living—for
a time.”
Mary Standish had bowed her face in her hands. He saw the tremor of her
slim shoulders; and when he came back, and she looked up at him, it was
as if he beheld the pallid beauty of one of the white tundra flowers.
“And the man who committed that crime—was John Graham,” she said, in
the strangely passionless voice of one who knew what his answer would
be.
“Yes, John Graham. He was there, representing big interests in the
States. The foreman had objected to what happened; many of the men had
protested; a few of them, who knew my father, had thrown up their work
rather than be partners to that crime. But Graham had the legal power;
they say he laughed as if he thought it a great joke that a cabin and a
grave should be considered obstacles in his way. And he laughed when my
father and I went to see him; yes, _laughed_, in that noiseless, oily,
inside way of his, as you might think of a snake laughing.
“We found him among the men. My God, you don’t know how I hated
him!—Big, loose, powerful, dangling the watch-fob that hung over his
vest, and looking at my father in that way as he told him what a fool
he was to think a worthless grave should interfere with his work. I
wanted to kill him, but my father put a hand on my shoulder, a quiet,
steady hand, and said: ‘It is my duty, Alan. _My duty_.’
“And then—it happened. My father was older, much older than Graham, but
God put such strength in him that day as I had never seen before, and
with his naked hands he would have killed the brute if I had not
unlocked them with my own. Before all his men Graham became a mass of
helpless pulp, and from the ground, with the last of the breath that
was in him, he cursed my father, and he cursed me. He said that all the
days of his life he would follow us, until we paid a thousand times for
what we had done. And then my father dragged him as he would have
dragged a rat to the edge of a piece of bush, and there he tore his
clothes from him until the brute was naked; and in that nakedness he
scourged him with whips until his arms were weak, and John Graham was
unconscious and like a great hulk of raw beef. When it was over, we
went into the mountains.”
During the terrible recital Mary Standish had not looked away from him,
and now her hands were clenched like his own, and her eyes and face
were aflame, as if she wanted to leap up and strike at something unseen
between them.
“And after that, Alan; after that—”
She did not know that she had spoken his name, and he, hearing it,
scarcely understood.
“John Graham kept his promise,” he answered grimly. “The influence and
money behind him haunted us wherever we went. My father had been
successful, but one after another the properties in which he was
interested were made worthless. A successful mine in which he was most
heavily interested was allowed to become abandoned. A hotel which he
partly owned in Dawson was bankrupted. One after another things
happened, and after each happening my father would receive a polite
note of regret from Graham, written as if the word actually came from a
friend. But my father cared little for money losses now. His heart was
drying up and his life ebbing away for the little cabin and the grave
that were gone from the foot of the mountain. It went on this way for
three years, and then, one morning, my father was found on the beach at
Nome, dead.”
“_Dead_!”
Alan heard only the gasping breath in which the word came from Mary
Standish, for he was facing the window, looking steadily away from her.
“Yes—murdered. I know it was the work of John Graham. He didn’t do it
personally, but it was _his money_ that accomplished the end. Of course
nothing ever came of it. I won’t tell you how his influence and power
have dogged me; how they destroyed the first herd of reindeer I had,
and how they filled the newspapers with laughter and lies about me when
I was down in the States last winter in an effort to make _your_ people
see a little something of the truth about Alaska. I am waiting. I know
the day is coming when I shall have John Graham as my father had him
under our mountain twenty years ago. He must be fifty now. But that
won’t save him when the time comes. No one will loosen my hands as I
loosened my father’s. And all Alaska will rejoice, for his power and
his money have become twin monsters that are destroying Alaska just as
he destroyed the life of my father. Unless he dies, and his money-power
ends, he will make of this great land nothing more than a shell out of
which he and his kind have taken all the meat. And the hour of
deadliest danger is now upon us.”
He looked at Mary Standish, and it was as if death had come to her
where she sat. She seemed not to breathe, and her face was so white it
frightened him. And then, slowly, she turned her eyes upon him, and
never had he seen such living pools of torture and of horror. He was
amazed at the quietness of her voice when she began to speak, and
startled by the almost deadly coldness of it.
“I think you can understand—now—why I leaped into the sea, why I wanted
the world to think I was dead, and why I have feared to tell you the
truth,” she said. “_I am John Graham’s wife._”