OVER THE MOUNTAINS
“He didn't do it!”
Suddenly, Sara found herself saying the words aloud in the darkness and
solitude of the night.
Since her meeting with Garth, on her way to the hospital, every hour had
been an hour of conflict. That brief, strained interview had shaken her
to the depths of her being, and, unable to sleep when night came,
she had lain, staring wide-eyed into the dark, struggling against its
influence.
Little enough had been said. It had been the silences, the dumb,
passion-filled silences, vibrant with all that must not be spoken,
which had tried her endurance to the utmost, and she had fled, at last,
incontinently, because she had felt her resolution weakening each moment
she and Garth remained together--because, with him beside her, the love
against which she had been fighting for twelve long months had wakened
into fierce life again, beating down her puny efforts to withstand it.
The mere sound of his voice, the lightest touch of his hand, had power
to thrill her from head to foot, to rock those barriers which his own
act had forced her to build up between them.
The recollection of that one perfect moment, when the serene austerity
of his face had given the lie to that of which he was accused, lingered
with her, a faint elusive thread of hope which would not leave her,
urging, suggesting, combating the hard facts to which he himself had
given ruthless confirmation.
Almost without her cognizance, Sara's characteristic, vehement belief
in whomsoever she loved--stunned at the first moment of Elisabeth's
revelation--had been gradually creeping back to feeble, halting life,
weakened at times by the mass of evidence arrayed against it, yet still
alive--growing and strengthening secretly within her as an unborn babe
grows and strengthens.
And since that moment on the moor, when her eyes had searched Garth's
face--his face with the mask off--the dormant belief within her had
sprung into conscious knowledge.
Throughout the long hours of the night she had fought against it,
deeming it but the passionate outcome of her love for the man himself.
She _wanted_ to believe him innocent; it was only her love for him which
had raised this phantom doubt of the charges brought against him; the
wish had been father to the thought. So she told herself, struggling
conscientiously against that to which she longed to yield.
And then, making a mockery of the hateful thing of which he had
been accused, her individual knowledge of Garth himself rose up and
confronted her accusingly.
Nothing that she had ever known of him had pointed to any lack of
courage. It had been on no sudden, splendid impulse of a moment that he
had plunged into the sea and fought that treacherous, racing tide off
Devil's Hood Island. Quite composedly, deliberately, he had calculated
the risks--and taken them!
Once more, she recalled the vision of his face as she had seen it
yesterday, in that instant before he had perceived her nearness to
him--strong and steadfast, imprinted with a disciplined nobility--and
the repudiation of his dishonour leapt spontaneously from her lips.
“He didn't do it!”
She had spoken involuntarily, the thought rushing into words before she
was aware, and the sound of her own voice in the darkness startled her.
It seemed almost like a voice from some Otherwhere, authoritatively
assuring her of all she had ached to believe.
She lay back on her pillows, smiling a little at the illusion. But
the sense of peace, of blessed assuredness, remained with her. She had
struggled through the darkness of those bitter months of unbelief, and
now she had come out into the light on the other side. She felt dreamily
contented and at rest, and presently she fell asleep, trustfully, as a
little child may sleep, the smile still on her lips.
With morning came reaction--blank, sordid reaction, depressing her
unutterably.
Amid the score of trifling details incidental to the day's arrangements,
with the usual uninspiring conversation prevalent at the breakfast-table
going on around her, the mood of the previous night, informed, as it had
been, with that triumphant sense of exaltation, slipped from her like a
garment.
Supposing she were to tell them--to tell Selwyn and Molly--that, without
any further evidence, she was convinced of Garth's innocence? Why, they
would think she had gone mad! Regretfully, with infinite pain it might
be, but still none the less conclusively, they had accepted the fact of
his guilt. And indeed, what else could be expected of them, seeing that
he had himself acknowledged it?
And yet--that inner feeling of belief which had stirred into new life
refused to be repressed.
Mechanically she went about the small daily duties which made up life
at Sunnyside--interviewed Jane Crab, read the newspapers to Mrs. Selwyn,
accomplished the necessary shopping in the town, each and all with a
mind that was only superficially concerned with the matter in hand,
while, behind this screen of commonplace routine, she felt as though her
soul were struggling impotently to release itself from the bonds which
had bound it in a tyranny of anguish for twelve long months.
In the afternoon, she paid a visit to the Convalescent Hospital. She
made a practice of going there at least once a day and giving what
assistance she could. Frequently she relieved Miles of part of his
secretarial work, or checked through with him the invoices of goods
received. There were always plenty of odd jobs to be done, and, after
her strenuous work in France, she found it utterly impossible to settle
down to the life of masterly inactivity which Selwyn had prescribed for
her.
Audrey greeted her with a little flurry of excitement.
“Do you know that there was a Zepp over Oldhampton last night?” she
asked, as they went upstairs together. “Did you hear it?”
Sara shook her head. The memory of the previous night surged over her
like the memory of a vivid dream--the absolute assurance it had brought
her of Garth's innocence, an assurance which had grown vague and
doubtful with the daylight, just as the happenings of a dream grow
blurred and indistinct.
“No, I didn't hear anything,” she replied absently. “Did they do much
damage? I suppose they were after the munitions factory?”
“Yes. They dropped one bomb, that's all. It fell in a field, luckily.
But goodness knows how they got over without any one's spotting
them! Everybody's asking where our search-lights were. As for our
anti-aircraft guns, they've never had the opportunity yet to do
anything more than try our nerves by practicing! And last night a golden
opportunity came and went unobserved.”
“The milkman was babbling to Jane about Zeppelins this morning, but I
thought it was probably only the result of overnight potations at 'The
Jolly Sailorman.'”
“No, it was the real thing--'made in Germany,'” smiled Audrey. “I begin
to feel as if we were quite the hub of the universe, now that the Zepps
have acknowledged our existence.”
They paused outside the door of the room allotted to her husband's
activities.
“Miles will be glad to see you to-day,” she pursued. “He's bemoaning
a new manifestation of war-fever among the feminine population of
Monkshaven. Go in to him, will you? I must run off--I've got a million
things to see to. You're not looking very fit to-day”--suddenly
observing the other's white face and shadowed eyes. “Are you feeling up
to work?”
Sara nodded indifferently.
“Quite,” she said. “I shouldn't have come otherwise.”
Miles welcomed her joyfully.
“Bless you, my dear!” he exclaimed. “You're the very woman I wanted
to see. I'm snowed under with fool letters from females anxious to
entertain 'our poor, brave, wounded officers.' Head 'em off, will you?”
He thrust a bundle of letters into her hands. Then, as she moved toward
the windows, and the cold, searching light of the wintry sunshine fell
full on her face, his voice altered. “What is it? What has happened,
Sara?” he asked quickly.
She looked at him dumbly. Her lips moved, but no sound came. The sudden
question, accompanied by the swift, penetrating glance of Miles's brown
eyes, had taken her off her guard.
He limped across to her.
“Not a stroke of work for you to-day,” he said decisively, taking the
bundle of letters out of her hands. “Now tell me what's wrong?”
She looked away from him, a slow, shamed red creeping into her face. At
last--
“I've seen Garth,” she said very low.
Herrick nodded. He knew what that meeting had meant to one of these two
friends of his. Now he was to see the reverse of the medal. He waited,
his silence sympathetic and far more helpful than any eager, probing
question, however well-intentioned.
“Miles,” she burst out suddenly, “I'm--I'm wretched!”
“How's that?” He did not make the mistake of attributing her outburst to
a transient mood of depression. Something deeper lay behind it.
“Since I saw Garth yesterday I've been asking myself whether--whether
I've been doing him a ghastly injustice”--she moistened her dry
lips--“whether he was really guilty of--running away.”
“Ah!” Miles stuffed his hands in his pockets and limped the length
of the room and back. In that moment, he realized something of the
maddening, galling restraint of the bondage under which Garth Trent had
lived for years--the bondage of silence, and, within his pockets, his
hands were clenched when he halted again at Sara's side.
“Why?” he shot at her.
She hesitated. Then she caught her breath a little hysterically.
“Why--because--because I just can't believe it! . . . I've seen a lot
since I went away. I've seen brave men--and I've seen men . . . who
were afraid.” She turned her head aside. “They--the ones who were
afraid--didn't look . . . as Garth looks.”
Herrick made no comment. He put a question.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don't know. I expect you think I'm a fool? I've nothing to go on--on
the contrary, I've Garth's own admission that--that he _was_ cashiered.
And yet----Oh! Miles, if he were only doing anything--now--it would be
easier to believe in him! But--he holds absolutely aloof. It's as though
he _were_ afraid--still.”
“Have you ever thought”--Herrick spoke slowly, without looking at
her--“what this year of war must have meant to a man who has been
a soldier--and is one no longer?” His eyes came back to her face
meditatively.
“How--what do you mean?” she whispered.
“You've only got to look at the man to know what I mean. I think--since
the war broke out--that Trent has been through the bitterness of death.”
“But--but he could have enlisted--got in somehow--under another name,
had he _wanted_ to fight. Or he might have gone out and driven an
ambulance car--as Lester Kent did.”
Sara was putting to Herrick the very arguments which had arisen in
her own mind to confound the intuitive belief of which she had
been conscious since that moment of inward revelation on Crabtree
Moor--putting them forward in all their repulsive ugliness of fact, in
the desperate hope that Herrick might find some way to refute them.
“Some men might have done, perhaps,” answered Miles quietly. “But not
a man of Trent's temperament. Some trees bend in a storm--and when the
worst of it is past, they spring erect again. Some _can't_; they break.”
The words recalled to Sara's mind with sudden vividness the last letter
Patrick Lovell had ever written her--the one which he had left in the
Chippendale bureau for her to receive after his death. He had applied
almost those identical words to the Malincourt temperament, of which he
had recognized the share she had inherited. And she realized that her
guardian and Miles Herrick had been equally discerning. Though
differing in its effect upon each of them, consequent upon individual
idiosyncrasy, the fact remained that she and Garth were both “breaking”
beneath the strain which destiny had imposed on them.
With the memory of Patrick's letter came an inexpressible longing
for the man himself--for the kindly, helping hand which he would have
stretched out to her in this crisis of her life. She felt sure that, had
he been beside her now, his shrewd counsel would have cleared away the
mists of doubt and indecision which had closed about her.
But since he was no longer there to be appealed to, she had turned
instinctively to Herrick, and, somehow, he had failed her. He had not
given her a definite expression of his own belief. She had been humanly
craving to hear that he, too, believed in Garth, notwithstanding the
evidence against him--that he had some explanation to offer of that
ghastly tragedy of the court-martial episode. And instead, he had only
hazarded some tolerant suggestions--sympathetic to Garth, it is true,
but not carrying with them the vital, unqualified assurance she had
longed to hear.
In spite of this, she knew that Herrick's friendship with Garth had
remained unbroken by the knowledge of the Indian Frontier story. The
personal relations of the two men were unchanged, and she felt as though
Miles were withholding something from her, observing a reticence
for which she could find no explanation. He had been very kind and
understanding--it would not have been Miles had he been otherwise--but
he had not helped her much. In some curious way she felt as though he
had thrown the whole onus of coming to a decision, unaided by advice,
upon her shoulders.
She returned to Sunnyside oppressed with a homesick longing for Patrick.
The two years which had elapsed since his death had blunted the edge of
her sorrow--as time inevitably must--but she still missed the shrewd,
kindly, worldly-wise old man unspeakably, and just now, thrown back upon
herself in some indefinable way by Miles's attitude, her whole heart
cried out for that other who was gone.
She wondered if he knew how much she needed him. She almost believed
that he must know--wherever he might be now, she felt that Patrick would
never have forgotten the child of the woman whom, in this world, he had
loved so long and faithfully.
With an instinctive craving for some tangible memory of him, she
unlocked the leather case which held her mother's miniature, together
with the last letter which Patrick had ever written; and, unfolding the
letter, began to read it once again.
Somehow, there seemed comfort in the very wording of it, in every
little characteristic phrase that had been Patrick's, in the familiar
appellation, “Little old pal,” which he had kept for her alone.
All at once her fingers gripped the letter more tightly, her attentions
riveted by a certain passage towards the end.
“. . . And when love comes to you, never forget that it is the biggest
thing in the world, the one altogether good and perfect gift. Don't let
any twopenny-halfpenny considerations of worldly advantage influence
you, or the tittle-tattle of other folks, and even if it seems that
something unsurmountable lies between you and the fulfillment of love,
go over it, or round it, or through it! If it's real love, your faith
must be big enough to remove the mountains in the way--or to go over
them.”
Had Patrick foreseen the exact circumstances in which his “little old
pal” would one day find herself, he could not have written anything more
strangely applicable.
Sara sat still, every nerve of her taut and strung. She felt as though
she had laid bare the whole of her trouble, revealed her inmost soul in
all its anguished perplexity, to those shrewd blue eyes which had been
wont to see so clearly through externals, piercing infallibly to the
very heart of things.
Patrick had always possessed that supreme gift of being able to separate
the grain from the chaff--to distinguish unerringly between essentials
and non-essentials, and now, in the quiet, wise counsel of an old
letter, Sara found an answer to all the questionings that had made so
bitter a thing of life.
It was almost as if some one had torn down a curtain from before her
eyes, rent asunder a veil which had been distorting and obscuring the
values of things.
Mountains! There were mountains indeed betwixt her and Garth--and there
was no way round them or through them! But now--now she would go over
them--go straight ahead, unregarding of the mountains between, to where
Garth and love awaited her.
No man is all angel--or all devil. Supposing Garth _had_ been guilty of
cowardice, had had his one moment of weakness? She no longer cared! He
was hers, her lover, alike in his weakness and in his strength. She had
known men in France shrink in terror at the evil droning of a shell, and
then die selflessly that others might live.
“Your faith must be big enough to remove the mountains in the way--or to
go over them,” Patrick had written.
And Sara, hiding her face in her hands, thanked God that now, at last,
her faith was big enough, and that love--“the one altogether good and
perfect gift”--was still hers if she would only go over the mountains.