left for his lecture trip he had had a casual talk with Leopold, he
wrote. What Leopold really said is not recorded--Leopold was too honest
a man to have lied--but, nevertheless, Allen Blynn came away with the
certain impression that the long vigil had come to naught. Poets,
lovers and madmen have such seething brains!
“I have climbed to my ‘Top-o’-the-hill,’” wrote Allen; “beyond is
Canaan, but it is not for me.”
“How could he? How could he?” Gorgas whispered. “This is terrible,
Allen Blynn.” Solicitude for her man quite outweighed her own loss.
She read on: “Within sight of the promised land I must die and be
buried in the Valley of Moab,” he wrote on the final page. “What sin I
have committed I know not.... And now you will never find me out, my
child. Your birthday gift--this book of absurd confessions--must be
buried with me.
“‘And Jehovah showed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan and all
Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, and all the land
of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the South, and the Plain of the
Valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar.... And He
buried him in the valley in the land of Moab; but no man knoweth of
his sepulchre unto this day.’”
“Finis” was written in deliberate ink; but a white space below had left
room for a scrawl in pencil: “You are out there in the cab, little
woman, and Canaan is around and about me; yet I must not speak. When
you read these pages you will know and understand. The Old One is
fighting hard with me to break the faith; but I cannot, now. _Our life
together must not begin this way._ You must go home, and I must not
have it on my soul that I even so much as touched you. There is a way
that _seemeth_ right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of
death. In my stupid, iron-set, prejudiced, superstitious brain you are
a child until tomorrow. Tomorrow you will be something other, my right
woman. That other I will claim, but--tomorrow. _Tomorrow!_
“Your ecstatic, maybe-foolish, and altogether glorified,
“VINEGAR SAINT.”
“Oh, Allen Blynn! Allen Blynn!” the tearful little woman laughed in her
joy. “You are _too_ funny! You are _too, too_ funny!”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
No attempt was made to standardize dialect.