When Virginia heard the tramp of feet on her threshold she didn't dream
but that Bill had returned a day earlier than he had planned. Her heart
gave a queer little flutter of relief. The cabin had been lonely
to-night, the silence had oppressed her; most of all she had dreaded the
long night without the comforting reassurance of his presence. She
wouldn't have admitted, even to herself, that her comfort was so
dependent upon this man. And she sprang up, joyously as a bird
springing from a bough, to welcome him.
The next instant she stopped, appalled. The door did not open, the
steps did not cross her threshold. Instead, knuckles rapped feebly on
the door.
Even in a city, it is a rather discomforting experience for a girl,
alone in a home at night, to answer a tap on the door. Here in this
awful silence and solitude she was simply and wholly terrified. She
hadn't dreamed that there was a stranger within many miles of the cabin.
For an instant she didn't know what to do. The knock sounded again.
But Virginia had acquired a certain measure of self-discipline in these
weary weeks, and her mind at once flashed to her pistol. Fortunately
she had not taken it from her belt, and she had full confidence in her
ability to shoot it quickly and well. Besides, she remembered that her
door was securely bolted.
"Who's there?" she asked. "Is it you, Bill?"
"It's not Bill," the answer came. "But he's here."
The first thought that came to her was that Bill had been injured, hurt
in some adventure in the snow, and men had brought him back to the
cabin. Something that was like a sickness surged through her frame.
But an instant more she knew that, had he been injured, there would have
been no wayfarers to find him and bring him in. There was only one
remaining possibility: that this man was one whom Bill had gone out to
find and who had returned with him.
The thought was so startling, so fraught with tremendous possibilities
that for a moment she seemed to lose all power of speech or action.
"Who is it?" she asked again, steadily as she could.
And the answer came strange and stirring through the heavy door. "It's
I--Harold Lounsbury. Bill told me to come."
Virginia was oppressed and baffled as if in a mysterious dream. For the
moment she stood still, trying to quiet her leaping heart and her
fluttering nerves. Yet she knew she had to make answer. She knew that
she must find out whether this voice spoke true--whether or not it was
her lost lover, returned to her at last.
Yet there could be no mistake. The voice was the same that she
remembered of old. It was as if it had spoken out of the dead years.
Her hands clasped at her breast, then she walked to the threshold and
opened the door.
Harold Lounsbury stepped through, blinking in the candlelight.
Instinctively the girl flung back, giving him full right of way and
staring as if he were a ghost. He turned to her, half apologetic.
"Bill told me to come," he said.
The man stood with arms limp at his side, and a great surge of mingled
emotions swept the girl as in a flood. She was pale as a ghost, and her
hands trembled when she stretched them out. "Harold," she murmured
unsteadily. She tried to smile. "Is it really you, Harold?"
"It's I," he answered. "We've come together--at last."
The words seemed to rally her scattered faculties. The dreamlike
quality of the scene at once dissolved. Utter and bewildering surprise
is never an emotion that can long endure; its very quality makes for
brevity. Already some leveling, cool sense within her had begun to
accept the fact of his presence.
Instinctively her eyes swept his face and form. All doubt was past:
this man was unquestionably Harold. Yet she was secretly and vaguely
shocked. Her first impression was one of change: that the years had
some way altered him,--other than the natural changes that no living
creature may escape.
In reality his face had aged but little. He had worn just such a
mustache when he went away. Perhaps his eyes were changed: for the
moment she thought that they were, and the change repelled her and
estranged her. His mouth was not quite right, either; his form, though
powerful, had lost some of its youthful trimness.
It seemed to her, for one fleeting instant, that there was a brutality
in his expression that she had never seen before. But at once the
reaction came. Of course these northern forests had changed him. He
had fought with the cold and the snow, with all the primeval forces of
nature: he had simply hardened and matured. It was true that the calm
strength of Bill's face was not to be seen in his. Nevertheless he was
clean, stalwart, and his embarrassment was a credit to him rather than a
discredit.
This thought was the beginning of the reaction that in a moment grasped
her and held her. The truth suddenly flamed clear and bright: that
Harold Lounsbury had returned to her arms. Her search was over. She
had won. He stood before her, alive and well. He had come back to her.
Her effort had been crowned with success.
He was her old lover, in the flesh. Of course she would experience some
shock on first meeting him, see some changes; but they were nothing that
should keep her from him. He seized her hands in both of his.
"Virginia," he cried. "My God, I can't believe it's you!"
She remained singularly cool in the ardor of this cry. "Why didn't you
write?" she asked. "Why didn't you come home?"
The questions, instead of embarrassing him further, put Harold at his
ease. He was on safe grounds now. He had prepared for just these
queries, on the long walk to the cabin.
"I did write," he cried. "Why didn't you answer?"
The words came glib to his lips. She stared at him in amazement. "You
did--you say you wrote to me?" she asked him, deeply moved.
"Wrote? I wrote a dozen times. And I never received a word--except
from Jules Nathan."
"But Jules Nathan--Jules Nathan is dead!"
"He is?" But Harold's surprise was feigned. This was one piece of news
that had trickled through the wastes to him,--of the death of Jules
Nathan, a man known to them both. It was safe to have heard from
him. The contents of the letter could never be verified. "He told
me--after I'd written many times, and never got an answer--that you
were engaged to be married--to a Chicago man. I thought you'd forgotten
me. I thought you'd been untrue."
Virginia held hard on her faculties and balanced his words. She had
known Chicago men during the six years that she had moved in the most
exalted social circles of her own city. The story held water, even if
she had been inclined to doubt it. She knew it was always easy for an
engagement rumor to start and be carried far, when a prominent girl was
involved. "I didn't get your letters," she told him. "Are you sure you
addressed them right----"
"I thought so----"
"And you didn't get mine----"
"No--not after the first few days. I changed my address--but I told
you of the change in a letter. I never heard from you after that."
"Then it's all been a misunderstanding--a cruel mistake. And you
thought I had forgotten----"
"I thought you'd married some one else. I couldn't believe it when Bill
came to my cabin to-day and told me you were here--I've been trapping
over toward the Yuga. And now--we're together at last."
But curiously these last words cost her her self-possession. Instantly
she was ill at ease. The reestablishment of their old relation could
only come gradually: although she had not anticipated it, the six years
of separation had wrought their changes. She felt that she needed time
to become adjusted to him--just as a man who has been blind needs time
to become adjusted to his vision. And at once their proximity, in this
lonely cabin, was oddly embarrassing.
"Where's Bill?" she asked. She turned to the door and called. "Bill,
where are you?"
His voice seemed quite his own when he answered from the stillness of
the night. "I'll be in in a moment--I was just getting a load of
wood."
It wasn't true. He had been standing dumb and inert in the darkness,
his thoughts wandering afar. But he began hastily to fill his arms with
fuel. Virginia turned back to her new-found lover.
She was a little frightened by the expression on his face. His eyes
were glowing, the color had risen in his cheeks, he was curiously eager
and breathless. "Before he comes," he urged. "We've been apart so
long----"
His hands reached out and seized hers. He drew her toward him. She
didn't resist: she felt a deep self-annoyance that she didn't crave his
kiss. She fought away her unwonted fear; perhaps when his lips met hers
everything would be the same again, and her long-awaited happiness would
be complete. He crushed her to him, and his kiss was greedy.
Yet it was cold upon her lips. She struggled from his arms, and he
looked at her in startled amazement. In fact, she was amazed at
herself. When she had time to think it over, alone in her bed at night,
she decided that her desperate struggle had been merely an attempt to
free herself from his arms before Bill came in and saw them. She only
knew that she didn't want this comrade of hers, this stalwart forester,
to see her in Harold's embrace. But in the second of the act she had
known a blind fear, almost a repulsion, and an overwhelming desire to
escape.
She turned with a radiant smile to welcome the tall form that strode in,
looking neither to the right nor left, arms heaped with wood. She
found, much to her surprise, that she felt more at ease after Bill came
in. She asked him how he had happened to get trace of the missing man;
he answered in an even, almost expressionless tone that someway puzzled
her. Then she launched desperately into that old life-saver in moments
of embarrassment,--a discussion of the fates and fortunes of mutual
acquaintances.
"But I'm tired, Harold," she told him in an hour. "The surprise of
seeing you has been--well, too much for me. I believe I'll go to my
room. It's behind that curtain."
Harold rose eagerly as if something was due him in the moment of
parting; Bill got up in respect to her. But her glance was impartial.
A moment later she was gone.
The first night Bill and Harold made bunks on the floor of the cabin,
but health and propriety decreed that such an arrangement could only be
temporary. They could not put their trust in an immediate deliverance.
They might be imprisoned for weeks to come. And Bill solved the problem
with a single suggestion.
They would build a small cabin for the two men to sleep in. Many times
he had erected such a structure by his own efforts; the two of them
could push it up in a few hours' work.
Harold had no fondness for toil of this kind, but he couldn't see how he
could well avoid it. His indifference to his own fate was quite past by
now. The single moment before Bill had entered the cabin door had
thoroughly wakened his keenest interests and desires; already, he
thought, he had entirely re-established his relations with Virginia. He
was as anxious to make good now as she was to have him. Already he
thought himself once more a man and a gentleman of the great outside
world. His vanity was heightened; the girl's beauty had increased, if
anything, since his departure; and he was more than ready to go through
the adventure to its end. And he didn't dare run the risk of
displeasing Virginia so soon after their meeting.
He knew how she stood on the matter. He had ventured to make one
protest,--and one had been quite enough. "I'm really not much good at
cabin building," he had said. "But I don't see why Bill shouldn't go
work at it. I suppose you hired him for all camp work."
For an instant Virginia had stared at him in utter wonder, and then a
swift look of grave displeasure had come into her face. "You forget,
Harold, that it was Bill that brought you back. The thirty days he was
hired for were gone long ago." But she had softened at once. "It's
your duty to help him, and I'll help him too, if I can."
They had cut short logs, cleaned away the snow, and with the strength of
their shoulders lifted the logs one upon another. With his ax Bill
cunningly cut the saddles, carving them down so that the rainfall would
drain down the corners rather than lie in the cavities and thus rot the
timbers. Planks were cut for the roof, and tree boughs laid down for
the floor.
The floor space was only seven feet long by eight wide--just enough
for two bunks--and the walls were about as high as a sleeping-car
berth. The work was done at the day's end.
In the next few days Bill mostly left the two together, trying to find
his consolation in the wild life of the forest world outside the cabin.
Harold had taken advantage of his absence and had made good progress:
Virginia's period of readjustment was almost complete. She was prepared
to make the joys of the future atone for the sorrows of the past.
Harold was still good-looking, she thought; his speech, though breaking
careless at times, was attractive and charming; and most of all his
love-making was more arduous than ever. In the city life that they
planned he would fit in well; his uncle would help him to get on his
feet. Fortunately for their peace of mind, they did not know the real
truth,--that Kenly Lounsbury himself was at that moment struggling
with financial problems that were about to overwhelm him. She told
herself, again and again, that her life would be all that she had
dreamed, that her fondest hopes had come true. A few weeks more of the
snow and the waste places,--and then they could start life anew.
Yet there was something vaguely sinister, something amiss in the fact
that she found herself repeating the thought so many times. It was
almost as if she were trying to reassure herself, to drown out some
whispering inner voice of doubt and fear. She couldn't get away from a
haunting feeling that, in an indescribable way, her relations with
Harold had changed.
His ardent speeches didn't seem to waken sufficient response in her own
breast. She lacked the ecstasy, the wonder that she had known when, as
a girl, she had first become engaged to Harold. They embarrassed her
rather than thrilled her; they didn't seem quite real. Perhaps she had
simply grown older. That was it: some of her girlish romance had died a
natural death. She would give his man her love, would take his in
return, and they would have the usual, normal happiness of marriage.
All would come out well, once they got away from the silence and the
snows.
Perhaps his large and extravagant speeches were merely out of place in
the stark reality of the wilderness; they could thrill her as ever when
she returned to her native city. Likely he could dance, after a little
practice, as well as ever; fill his niche in society and give her all
the happiness that woman has a right to expect upon this imperfect
earth. There was certainly nothing to be distressed over now. They had
been brought together as if by a miracle; any haunting doubt and fear,
too subtle and intangible to put into words or even concrete thought,
would quickly pass away.
She did not, however, go frequently into his arms. Someway, an
embarrassment, a sense of inappropriateness and unrest always assailed
her when he tried to claim the caresses that he felt were his due. And
at first she could not find a plausible explanation for her reserve.
Perhaps these tendernesses were also out of place in the grim reality of
the North; more likely, she decided, it was a subtle sense, the guardian
angel of her own integrity, warning her that too intimate relations with
that man must be avoided, isolated and exiled as they were. "Not now,
Harold," she would tell him. "Not until we're established again--at
home."
Finally his habits and his actions did not quite meet with her approval.
The first of these was only a little thing,--a failure to keep shaved.
Shaving in these surroundings, without a mirror, with a battered old
razor that had lain long in the cabin and had to be sharpened on a
whetstone, where every drop of hot water used had to be laboriously
heated on the stove, was an annoying chore at best: besides, there was
no one to see him except Virginia and the guide. The stubble matted and
grew on his lips and jowls. Bill, in contrast, shaved with greatest
care every evening. A more important point was that his avoidance of
his proper share of Bill's daily toil. He neither hewed wood nor drew
water, nor made any apologies for the omission. Rather he gave the idea
that Bill's services were due him by rights.
There was a little explosion, one afternoon, when he ventured to advise
her in regard to her relations with Bill. The forester himself was
cutting wood outside the cabin: they heard the mighty ring of his ax
against the tough spruce. Virginia was at work preparing their simple
evening meal; Harold was stretched on her own cot, the curtain drawn
back, his arms under his head, his unshaven face curiously dark and
unprepossessing.
"You must begin to keep on your own ground--with Bill, Virginia," he
began in the silence.
Virginia turned to him, a wave of hot resentment flowing clear to her
finger tips. If he had seen her flushed, intent face he would have
backed ground quickly. Unfortunately he was gazing quietly out the
window.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
Wholly aware of her own displeasure, wondering at it and anxious to hide
it, she was able to control her voice. Its tone gave no key to her
thoughts. Harold answered her, still unwarned:
"I mean--keep him at his distance. He's a different sort from you and
I. I don't mean he isn't all right, as far as his kind goes--but he
hasn't had the advantages." Harold spoke tolerantly, patronizingly.
"Those fellows are apt to take advantage of any familiarity. They're
all right if you keep 'em in their place--but they're mighty likely to
break lose from it any minute. I'm sorry you ever let him call you
Virginia."
Virginia's eyes blazed. If it is one of the precepts of good breeding
ever to let anger control the spirit, Virginia had made a breach indeed.
Her little hands clenched, and she had a fierce and insane desire to
beat those babbling lips with her fists. Then she struggled to regain
her composure.
"Listen, Harold," she began at last coldly. "I don't care to hear any
more such talk as that."
The man looked up then. He saw the righteous indignation in her face.
He felt the rising tide of his own anger. "I'm only trying to warn
you----" he began weakly.
"And I don't need or want any such warnings. I don't care what you
think of Bill--for that matter, you can be sure that Bill doesn't care
at all either--but I'll ask you to keep your thoughts to yourself.
Oh, if you only knew--how good, how strong, how true he has been--how
tender he has been to me----"
Harold was torn with jealous rage, and in his fury and malice he made
the worst mistake of all. "I hope he hasn't been _too_ tender----" he
suggested viciously.
But at once he was on his feet, begging her pardon. He knew that he had
made a dangerous and regrettable mistake. She forgave him--forgiveness
was as much a part of her as her graciousness or her loyalty--but she
didn't immediately forget. And Harold sat long hours with smoldering
eyes and clenched hands, a climbing fire and fury in his brain, while
the malice and resentment and jealousy that he held toward Bill grew to
hatred, bitter and black.