Hugh came up from his hiding-place like a man risen from the dead. They
helped him to his chair before the fire; they poured coffee down him,
rubbed his blue, stiff hands. He sat looking up pitifully, his eyes
turning from one to the other of them like those of a beaten hound. All
the masterfulness, all the bombast, had been crushed out of him; even
the splendor of his flaring hazel eyes was dimmed--they were hollow,
hopeless, old. For a long time he did not speak, only drank the coffee
and submitted himself meekly to their ministrations; then at last he
touched Sylvie with a trembling hand.
“Sylvie,” he whispered brokenly.
“Hugh, dear, you’re safe now; please speak; please laugh; you frighten
me more than anything--why is he so silent, Pete? Bella, tell me what’s
wrong?”
“He’s been crouching there on the damp, cold ground for hours,” said
Bella, “not knowing what might happen.” Her voice trembled; she passed a
hand as shaking as her voice across Hugh’s bent head. “You’re safe now.
You’re safe now,” she murmured.
Hugh’s teeth chattered, and he bent closer to the fire.
“Ugh--it was cold down there,” he said, “like a grave! Sylvie, come
here.” Just an echo of his old imperious fashion it was--though the
look was that of a beggar for alms. “Give me those warm little hands of
yours.” She knelt close to him, rubbed his hands in hers, looking up at
Pete with a tremulous mouth that asked for advice.
“He’ll be all right in a minute,” said Pete. “You talk to him, Sylvie.”
“Yes, you talk--you talk. Do you remember how I talked to you when you
were afraid of the bears--ah!” He drew her head savagely against his
breast, folded his arms about it, stroked the hair. “Sylvie! Is it all
right? Can it be--the same?”
“Yes, yes, why not?”
“Were you frightened?”
“Not after the first. After they had described you, I knew that they
were looking for the wrong man, and then I felt all right. I didn’t
know--poor Hugh!--how cold and cramped you were. What a shame that you
took a false alarm and hid yourself! I don’t believe there would have
been a bit of danger if you’d stayed out. They’d never even heard of
you, I suppose.”
Her talk, so gay, so strangely at cross-purposes with reality, was like
a vivifying wine to him. The color came back into his face; a wild sort
of relief lighted his eyes.
“Then it didn’t occur to you, Sylvie, that that brute might have been
me--that the men might, after all, have been describing me--eh?” he
asked, risking all his hope on one throw.
She laughed, and, lifting herself a little in his arms, touched her soft
mouth to his. “But, Hugh, you told me your story, don’t you remember?
And it is gloriously, mercifully different from Rutherford’s.”
He put his chin on his fist and stared over her head into the fire.
She felt the slackening of his embrace and searched his arms with
questioning fingers. “Why are you cross, Hugh? Did I say anything to
hurt you? Let’s forget Ham Rutherford. I wonder where he is, poor,
horrible wretch!”
“Dead--dead--dead,” Hugh muttered. “Dead and buried--or he ought to be.
O God!” he groaned, and crushed her close against him; “I can’t ask you
to love me, Sylvie--to marry me. Now you know what it is like to love a
man who must be afraid of other men. What right have I to ask any woman
to share my life?”
“But, Hugh--if I love you?”
“And you do love me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He laughed out at that, stood up, drawing her to stand beside him.
“Bella--Pete,” he called, “do you hear--you two?” He beckoned them
close, laid a hand on them, drew first one, then the other toward
Sylvie. “She loves me. She sees me as I am!” Suddenly he put his
grizzled head on Sylvie’s shoulder and wept. She felt her way back to
the chair, sat down, and drew him to kneel with his arms about her, her
head bent over him, her small hands caressing him. She looked at Pete
for help, for explanations, but she could not see his pale, tormented
face.
After a while Hugh was calm and sat at her feet, smoking. But he was
unnaturally silent, and his eyes brooded upon her haggardly.
It was several days before Hugh regained his old vigor and buoyancy;
then it came to life like an Antaeus flung down to mother earth. His
hour of doubt, of self-distrust, of compunction, was whirled away like
an uprooted tree on the flood of his happiness. He flung reason and
caution to the four winds; he dared Bella or Pete to betray him, he
played his heroic part with boisterous energy; his tongue wagged like a
tipsy troubadour’s. What an empty canvas, a palette piled with rainbow
tints, a fistful of clean brushes would be to an artist long starved for
his tools, such was Sylvie’s mind to Hugh. She was darkness for him to
scrawl upon with light; she was the romantic ear to his romantic tongue;
she was the poet reader for his gorgeous imagery. He had not only the
happiness of the successful lover, but even more, the happiness of the
successful creator. What he was creating was the Hugh that might have
been.
With Sylvie clinging to his hand, he now went out singing--the three of
them together, great Hugh and happy artist Hugh all but welded into
one man for her and for her love. Those were splendid days, days of
fantastic happiness. Hugh’s joy, his sense of freedom, gave him a
tenfold gift of fascination.
Yet one day--one of those dim, moist spring days more colorful to Hugh’s
heart than any of his days--there cut into his consciousness like a
hard, thin edge, a sense of a little growing change in Sylvie. It had
been there--the change,--slightly, dimly there, ever since the sheriff’s
visit. It was not that she doubted Hugh--such a suspicion would have
struck him instantly aware and awake--but that she had become in some
way uncertain of herself, restless, depressed, afraid. And it was always
his love-making that brought the reaction, a curious, delicate, inner
recoil, so delicate and slight, so deep beneath the threshold of her
consciousness, that in the blind glory of his self-intoxication he
missed it altogether--might, indeed, have gone on missing it, as she
would have gone on ignoring or repressing it, if it had not been for
their kiss on the mountain-top.
This was one of Hugh’s madnesses; he would take Sylvie up a mountain and
show her his kingdom, show her himself as lord of the wilderness. He had
been there before many times, to the top of their one mountain, always
under protest from Bella and Pete. It was a bare rock exposed to half
the world and all the eyes of Heaven; and for a man in hiding, a man who
lived, yet whose name was carved above a grave, it was a very target for
untoward accident. Some trader or trapper down in the forest might look
up and behold the misshapen figure black and bold, against the sky.
Yet there was never so mighty a Hugh as when he stood there defiant and
alone. Now he wanted Sylvie to sense that tragic magnificence.
So they went out, Hugh’s arm about her, as strange a pair of lovers as
ever tempted the spring--the great, scarred, uncouth, gray cripple and
the slim, unseeing girl, groping and clinging, absolutely shut off from
any contact with reality as long as this man should interpret creation
for her. Sylvie turned back to wave at Pete, whom they had left standing
in the doorway.
“I’ll be hunting for you if you stay out late,” he called--to which Hugh
shouted back: “You hunting for us! Don’t fancy I can’t take care of this
child, myself.”
“Both of them blind!” Pete muttered to himself in answer.
They were moving rather slowly across the rough, sagebrush-covered flat,
and presently Hugh led Sylvie into the fragrant silence of the forest
trail. To her it was all scent and sound. Hugh whispered to her what
this drumming meant and that chattering and that sudden rattle almost
under their feet.
They had to go slowly, Sylvie touching the trees here and there, along
her side of the trail. He lifted her over logs and fallen trees, and
sometimes, before he set her down, he kissed her. Then Sylvie would turn
her head shyly, and he would laugh. Thus they made slow, sweet progress.
“I see more in the woods with your eyes than I ever could with my own,”
she told him.
“I have eyes for us both,” he answered. “That’s why God gave me the eyes
I have, because He knew the use I’d be making of them.”
“Is this the trail Pete follows to the trading-station?” she asked. “I
wish you could take me there, Hugh, or--would you let him take me?”
He tightened his arm. “I can’t bear to have you out of my sight,” he
answered.
She sighed. “It seems so queer that they haven’t tried to find me. Do
you suppose they think that I’m dead? Did Pete mail my letter to Miss
Foby, I wonder?”
“What does Miss Foby matter?” he asked jealously. “What does anything
matter to you but--me? Here we leave Pete’s trail and I take you
straight up the mountain, dear one. We’ll rest now and then; when we get
to the rocky place just below the top, I’ll carry you. Are you happy?
I always feel as if my heart melted with the snow when spring comes--a
wild, free, tumbling feeling of softness and escape.”
She sighed. “Yes--if only I could see. I miss my eyes out of doors more
than in the house. Does snow-blindness really last so long? Perhaps it
was the nervous shock and the exhaustion as much as the glare. I am sure
it all will just go suddenly some day. I stare and stare sometimes, and
I feel as if I might see--almost.”
He frowned. “You mustn’t miss anything when you have me, Sylvie. Do you
suppose I miss anything, now that I have you? My career, my old friends,
my old life, my liberty, the world? That for everything!” He snapped his
fingers. “If only I have you.”
“You love me so much,” she answered, as though she were oppressed, “it
frightens me sometimes.”
“When you are wholly mine--” he began. “Well, wait till we get to the
top of the mountain; there I’ll tell you all my plans. They’re as big
and beautiful as the world. I feel, with your love, that I can move
mountains. I can fashion the world close to my heart’s desire. We’ll
leave this blank spot and go to some lovely, warm, smiling land where
the water is turquoise and the sky aquamarine--”
“And perhaps my sight will come back.” It was almost a prayer.
He did not answer. They had come to a sharp sudden ascent. He took her
in his arms, scrambled across the tumbled rocks, and set her down beside
him on the great granite crest that rose like the edge of a gray wave.
The clean, wild wind smote her and shook her and pressed back her hair
and dress. She clung to him.
“Is it steep? Are we on the edge of a cliff, Hugh? I’m not afraid!”
“We’re on the very top of the world,” he told her breathlessly, his
voice filled with a sense of awe, “our world, Sylvie, I’m master here.
There’s no greater mind than my own in all that dark green circle. It’s
pines, pines, pines to the edge of the earth, Sylvie, an ocean of purple
and green--silver where the wind moves, treading down, like Christ
walking on the water. And the sky is all gray, like stone.”
“Can you see the flat, the cabin?”
“The flat, yes--a round green spot, way down there behind us. The cabin?
No. That’s in a hollow, you may be sure, well out of sight. I’m an
outlaw, dearest, remember. There’s a curve of the river, like a silver
elbow. And Sylvie, up above us, an eagle is turning and turning in a
huge circle. He thinks he’s king. But, Sylvie, it’s our world--yours and
mine. This is our marriage.”
She drew back. “What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you a feeling for such images? We’ll go before a parson--don’t
be afraid. Would I frighten you, Sylvie? I love you too much for that.
Why, Sylvie, what’s wrong?”
When his lips, clinging and compelling, had left hers, she bent her face
to his arm and began to cry.
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.... But please don’t kiss me like that,
not like that!”
He released her and half turned, but her hands instantly hunted for him,
found him and clung.
“Hugh, don’t be angry. Be patient with me. Try to understand. Perhaps
it’s because I am in the dark. I do love you. I do. But you must wait.
Soon it will be spring for me, too. You don’t understand? You’re angry?
But I can’t explain it any better.”
“You can lay your hand on me,” he said hoarsely. “God knows I’m real
enough.” And he thought so! “My love for you is here like a granite
block, Sylvie.”
“I know. It is the one thing in the darkness that is real. I know
you--your love, splendid and strong and brave. Wait just a little, Hugh.
Try to be patient. Suddenly it will all come right. The fog will lift.
Then we’ll really be on top of the mountain.” She laughed, but rather
sadly.
“I will always hate this mountain-top,” he said. “I used to love it. I
was so close to happiness, and now you’ve snatched it out of my reach.”
He drew in sobbing breaths.
“No--it’s myself I’m keeping from happiness, not you,” she answered.
“I know it will come right, but you must not hurry me. Dear Hugh, be
patient.” She found his hand and raised it, a dead weight, to her lips.
“Please be patient. Let’s go down out of this wind. I can’t see your
world, and I’m cold.”
So, in silence--a dull gray silence Hugh led her down into the valley.