away from me. Thank Heaven, it is not one of the privileges a woman
forfeits by marrying out of her station.”
Forbes stayed three days longer; restless, wretched days whenever
he thought of himself and his position; sunlit and serene whenever
his facile temperament permitted him to forget them. He felt that
he should be moving on, yet, having stopped, was at a loss how to
proceed. Staying or going seemed equally difficult and dangerous. He
had no precedents to guide his action. Nothing in his previous life
and training had ever fitted him to be a fugitive. He was, as he often
reminded himself, not a fugitive from justice, but from injustice;
which is quite another matter, but after all hardly more comfortable.
He began to suspect that he might have been a fool to come away, but
was too dazed to decide intelligently whether he should go forward or
back. He was still in this undecided frame of mind on the morning of
the third day.
Wilson and his wife performed by turns the duties of telegraph
operator, with the difference that whereas she received by sound,
he took the messages on paper. On the evening of the second day of
Forbes’s stay, Wilson, sitting alone in the office, received a message
from Pueblo that startled him.
“Great Scott!” he said, and looked around to see if his wife was in
sight. She was not, and on reflection he felt thankful. It would
be better not to have her know. There were some things women, even
plucky ones, made a fuss about. They were not fond of seeing criminals
taken, for instance. So he answered the message, and having made the
requisite copy locked that in the office safe. The long strip of paper,
with its lines of dots and dashes, he crumpled carelessly and dropped
into the waste-basket.
The next afternoon Mrs. Wilson, in the process of sweeping out the
room, upset the waste-basket, and the crumpled piece of paper fell out
and rolled appealingly to her feet. There were a dozen messages on
the strip, but the last one riveted her eyes. She read it, then read
it again; returned it to the waste-basket and sat down to think with
folded hands in lap, her white face as inscrutable as the Sphinx. What
should she do? Should she do anything?
The man might be a criminal or he might not. The fact that he was
followed by detectives with papers for his arrest, who might be
expected to arrive on the afternoon train, proved nothing to her mind.
At the same time, criminal or none, if she interfered it might prove
a dangerous experiment for her, and was sure to be a troublesome one.
Why, then, should she interfere?
There was only one reason, but it was a reason rooted in the dumb
depths of her being--the depths that this man’s bearing had so
disturbed. He was of her people; on her side--though it was the side
that had cast her off. The faint, sweet memories of her earliest
years pleaded for him; the enduring bitterness of that later life
which she had lived sometimes forgetfully, sometimes--but this was
rare--prayerfully, sometimes with long-drawn sighs, seldom with tears,
always in silence, fought for him; the inextinguishable class-spirit
fought for him--and fought successfully.
She looked at the clock. It lacked an hour of train-time. What she did
must be done quickly.
She went out to her husband, loafing on the platform.
“I’ve got to go to Connor’s, Jim. There’s no butter and no eggs.”
Wilson looked up carelessly. “All right,” he said.
She went into the back room which served as kitchen and store-room and
provided herself with a basket, into which she put meat and bread. As
she left the station, Wilson came around to the side and called to her:
“You’ll be back by supper-time, Ellen?”
The woman nodded, not looking back, and plunged on up the rocky spur.
When she found him, an hour later, Forbes was lying on a sunny slope
indulging in the luxury of a day-dream. He was stretched out at full
length, his arms under his head, the sketch-book that he had not used
lying by his side unopened. For the life of him he could not feel
that his position was serious, and the mountain-air and the sunshine
intoxicated him.
“Once I get clear of this thing,” he was saying to himself, “I’ll come
back here and buy me a ranch. Why should anybody who can live here want
to live anywhere else?”
To him in this pastoral mood appeared the woman. There was that in her
face which made him spring to his feet in vague alarm before she opened
her lips.
“They’re after you,” she said. “You must be moving. Do you know what
you want to do? What was your idea in stopping here? Have you any
plans?”
He shook his head helplessly. “I thought perhaps--Mexico?”
“Mexico! But what you want just now is a place to hide in till they
have given you up and gone along. After that you can think about
Mexico. Come! I’ve heard the whistle. The train is in. You’re all
right if they don’t start to look for you before supper-time, and I
hardly think they will, for they’ll expect you to come in. But if
anybody should stroll out to look over the country, this place is in
sight from the knoll beside the station. Come!”
Stumbling, he ran along beside her.
“I swear to you,” he said between his labored breaths, “I did not do
it. I am not unworthy of your help. But the evidence was damning and my
friends told me to clear out. I may have been a fool to come--but it is
done.”
Her calm face did not change.
“You must not waste your breath,” she warned. “We have two miles to
go, and then I must walk to Connor’s and get back by six o’clock, or
there’ll be trouble.”
They were working their way back toward the station, but going farther
to the east. She explained briefly that their objective point was the
nearest canyon. She knew a place there where any one would be invisible
both from above and below. It was fairly accessible--“if you are
sure-footed,” she warned. Here he might hide himself in safety for a
day or two. She had brought him food. It would not be comfortable, but
it was hardly a question of his comfort.
“You are very good,” said Forbes, simply. “I don’t want to give myself
up now. You are very good,” he repeated, wondering a little why she
should take the pains.
She made no answer, only hastened on.
To Forbes the way seemed long. His feet grew heavy and his head
bewildered. Was this really he, this man who was in flight from justice
and dependent on the chance kindness of a stranger for shelter from the
clutches of the law?
They reached the canyon and began to make their way slowly down and
along its side. The woman led fearlessly over the twistings of a trail
imperceptible to him. He followed dizzily. Suddenly she turned.
“It is just around this rock that juts out in front. Is your head
steady? It falls off sheer below and the path is narrow.”
“Go on,” he said, and set his teeth.
The path was steep as well as narrow, and the descent below was sheer
and far. Mid-way around the rocks a mist came over his eyes. He put up
his hand, stumbled, fell forward and out, was dimly aware that he had
fallen against his guide.
A crash and cry awoke the echoes of the canyon. Then silence settled
over it again--dead silence--and the night came down.
Their bodies were not found until three days later. When the Eastern
detectives had identified their man they proposed his burial, but
Wilson turned from the place with the muscles of his throat working
with impotent emotion, and a grim look about his mouth that lifted his
lips like those of a snarling beast.
“Carrion! Let it lie,” he said, with so dark a face that the men
followed him silently, saying nothing more, and the two were left lying
upon the ground which had drunk with impartial thirst the current that
oozed from their jagged wounds.
The suspicions of primitive men are of a primitive nature. Those three
days in which nothing had been seen or heard of his wife or Forbes had
been a long agony to Wilson. And now that the end had come it seemed
to him that his basest suspicions were confirmed. To his restricted
apprehension there was but one passion in the world that could have
sent his wife to this stranger’s side, to guard and save him at her
cost. So thinking, it seemed to him that swift justice had been done.
And that he might not forget, nor let his fierce thoughts of her grow
more tender, the next day when the train had gone eastward and he was
left alone to his desolation he took his brush and laboriously wrote
across the end of the high platform, in great letters for all men to
see and wonder at, the phrase he thought her fitting epitaph:
THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.
And there it still stands, remaining in its stupid, brutal accusation
the sole monument on earth of a woman’s ended life.
HARDESTY’S COWARDICE
I
Straight on before them stretched the street, a wide and unobstructed
way at first, but narrowing a little farther on, where there were,
besides, buildings going up, and great piles of lumber standing far out
in the road, and heaps of sand, and mortar-beds. Could he possibly get
the horses under control before they reached those cruel lumber piles,
where to be thrown meant death or worse? They were running wildly, and
it was down hill all the way. She did not believe that human strength
could do it, not even Neil’s, and he was as strong as he was tender.
She looked down at his hands and noticed how white the knuckles were,
and how the veins stood out, and then she bent her head that she might
not see those fatal obstructions in their way, and clasped her hands
as tightly as her lips. She found herself senselessly repeating, over
and over, as if it were a charm, “_Broad is the way ... that leadeth to
destruction._”
It was a June morning, cool and sweet. If ever, life is dear in June.
Her eyes fell on the great bunch of white roses in her lap. He had
put them in her hands just as they were starting, and then had bent
suddenly and left a quick kiss on the hands. It was only the other day
he had told her that he had never, from the very first hour they met,
seen her hands without longing to fill them with flowers. Would she be
pleased to take notice, now that he possessed the right, he meant to
exercise it?
Poor roses! Must they be crushed and mangled, too? She did not like
the thought of scarlet stains upon their whiteness, and with some wild
thought of saving them--for were they not his roses?--she flung them
with a sudden gesture into the street.
“Oh, Christ!” she cried, voicelessly, “spare both of us--or neither!”
It was just then that the horses swerved and reared, the carriage
struck something in the road and tilted sharply to the right. She
clutched the side involuntarily and kept her seat. When, a second
later, the carriage had righted itself, and the horses, more terrified
still and now wholly uncontrolled, were dashing forward again, the
place beside her was vacant, and the reins were dragging on the ground.
She shut her eyes and waited. It was not long to wait. There came a
crash, a whirl, and then unconsciousness.
The evening papers contained an account of the fortunate escape from
serious disaster of Mr. Neil Hardesty and Miss Mildred Fabian, who were
on their way to a field meeting of the Hambeth Historical Society when
the young blooded horses Mr. Hardesty was driving took fright at a
bonfire at the corner of State and Market Streets, and started to run.
Owing to the sharp down-grade at this point, their driver was unable
to control them. After keeping their course in a mad gallop down State
Street for a quarter of a mile, the carriage struck an obstruction,
tipped, and Mr. Hardesty was thrown out, being severely bruised, but
sustaining no serious injuries. The horses continued running wildly
for two blocks more, when one of them ran against a lamp-post and
was knocked down, upsetting the carriage and throwing Miss Fabian
out. She was picked up unconscious, but beyond a cut on the head was
also fortunately uninjured. Mr. Hardesty and Miss Fabian were to be
congratulated upon the results of the runaway, as such an accident
could hardly occur once in a hundred times without more serious, and
probably fatal, consequences.
It was some two weeks later that the family physician, consulting with
Mrs. Fabian in the hall, shook his head and said he did not understand
it; there was no apparent reason why Miss Mildred should not have
rallied immediately from the accident. The shock to her nervous system
had doubtless been greater than he had at first supposed. Still, she
had been in sound health, and there seemed no sufficient cause for her
marked weakness and depression. He would prepare a tonic and send it up.
Meeting Neil Hardesty, himself an unfledged medical student, entering
the house, the doctor stopped to observe:
“You must try to rouse your fiancée a little. Can’t you cheer her up,
Hardesty? She seems very much depressed nervously. Perhaps it is only
natural after such a close shave as you had. I did not care to look
death in the face at that age. It sometimes startles young people and
happy ones.”
Neil shook his head with an anxious look.
“It is not that,” he said, “for she is half an angel already. But I
will do my best,” and he passed on through the broad, airy, darkened
hall to the high veranda at the back of the house, where he knew he
should find her at that hour.
The veranda overlooked the garden, blazing just then with the flowers
of early July. She was lying languidly in her sea-chair; there were
books around her, but she had not been reading; and work, but she had
not been sewing. One hand was lifted shading her face. The lines around
her mouth were fixed as if she were in pain.
He came forward quickly and knelt beside the chair. He was carrying
some brilliant clusters of scarlet lilies, and he caught the small and
rather chilly hand, and held it over them as if to warm it in their
splendid flame.
“Do you know that you look cold?” he demanded. “I want you to look at
these and hold them till you are warmed through and through. What an
absurd child it is to look so chilly in July!”
She raised her eyes and let them rest on him with a sudden radiant
expression of satisfaction.
“It is because you are so unkind as to go away--occasionally,” she
remarked. “Do I ever look cold or unhappy or dissatisfied while you are
here?”
“Once or twice in the last two weeks you have been all of that.
Sweetheart, I must know what it means. Don’t you see you must tell
me? How can one do anything for you when one doesn’t know what is the
matter? And I am under orders to see that you get well forthwith. The
doctor has given you up--to me!”
He was startled when, instead of the laughing answer for which he
looked, she caught her breath with half a sob.
“Must I tell you?” she said. “Neil, I do not dare! When you are here
I know it is not so. It is only when you are away from me that the
hideous thought comes. And I fight it so! It is only because I am tired
with fighting it that I do not get strong.”
“Dear, what can you mean?”
She shook her head.
“It is too horrible, and you would never forgive me, though I know it
cannot be true. Oh, Neil, Neil, _Neil_!”
“Mildred, this is folly. I insist that you tell me at once.” His tone
had lost its tender playfulness and was peremptory now. “Don’t you see
that you are torturing me?” he said.
She looked at him helplessly.
“That day,” she said, reluctantly, “when the carriage tipped and you
went out, I thought--I thought you jumped. Neil, don’t look so; I knew
you could not have done it, and yet I can’t get rid of the thought, and
it tortures me that I can think it--of you. Oh, I have hurt you!”
He was no longer kneeling beside her, but had risen and was leaning
against one of the pillars of the veranda, looking down at her with an
expression she had never dreamed of seeing in his eyes when they rested
on her face. He was white to the lips.
“You thought that? You have thought it these two weeks?”
“I tell you it is torture. Neil, say you did not, and let me be at
rest.”
“And you ask me to _deny_ it? You?” His voice was very bitter. “I
wonder if you know what you are saying?”
“Neil, Neil, say you did not!”
He set his teeth.
“Never!”
He broke the silence which followed by asking, wearily, at last:
“What was your idea in telling me this, Mildred? Of course you knew it
was the sort of thing that is irrevocable.”
“I knew nothing except that I must get rid of the thought.”
“Can’t you imagine what it is to a man to be charged with cowardice?”
“I charge nothing. But if you would only deny it!”
“Oh, this is hopeless!” he said, with an impatient groan. “It is
irremediable. If I denied it, you would still doubt; but even if you
did not, I could never forget that you had once thought me a coward.
There are some things one may not forgive.”
Silence again.
“And my--my wife must never have doubted me.”
She raised her eyes at last.
“If you are going, pray go at once,” she said. “I am too weak for
this.”
She said it, but she did not mean it. After all, it was the one
impossible thing on earth that anything should come between them.
Surely she could not alter the course of two lives by five minutes of
unguarded hysterical speech or a week or two of unfounded fretting.
But he took up his hat, and turned it in his hands.
“As you wish,” he said, coldly, and then “Good-morning,” and was gone.
II
“I think that is all,” said the hurried, jaded doctor to the
Northern nurse. “The child is convalescent--you understand about the
nourishment?--and you know what to do for Mrs. Leroy? I shall bring
some one who will stay with her husband within the hour.”
Outside was the glare of sun upon white sand--a pitiless sun, whose
rising and setting seemed the only things done in due order in all the
hushed and fever-smitten city. Within was a shaded green gloom and the
anguished moaning of a sick woman.
Mildred Fabian, alone with her patients and the one servant who had
not deserted the house, faced her work and felt her heart rise with
exultation--a singular, sustaining joy that never yet had failed her
in the hour of need. The certainty of hard work, the consciousness of
danger, the proximity of death--these acted always upon her like some
subtle stimulant. If she had tried to explain this, which she did not,
she would perhaps have said that at no other time did she have such
an overwhelming conviction of the soul’s supremacy as in the hours of
human extremity. And this conviction, strongest in the teeth of all
that would seem most vehemently to deny it, was to her nothing less
than intoxicating.
She was not one of the women to whom there still seems much left
in life when love is gone. To be sure, she had the consolations of
religion and a certain sweet reasonableness of temperament which
prompted her to pick up the pieces after a crash, and make the most of
what might be left. But she was obliged to do this in her own way. She
was sorry, but she could not do it in her mother’s way.
When she told her family that her engagement was at an end, that she
did not care to explain how the break came, and that if they meant
to be kind they would please not bother her about it, she knew that
her mother would have been pleased to have her take up her old life
with a little more apparent enthusiasm for it than she had ever shown
before. To be a little gayer, a little more occupied, a little prettier
if possible, and certainly a little more fascinating--that was her
mother’s idea of saving the pieces. But Mildred’s way was different,
and after dutifully endeavoring to carry out her mother’s conception of
the conduct proper to the circumstances with a dismal lack of success,
she took her own path, which led her through a training school for
nurses first, and so, ultimately, to Jacksonville.
The long day wore slowly into night. The doctor had returned very
shortly with a man, whether physician or nurse she did not know, whom
he left with Mr. Leroy. The little maid, who had been dozing in the
upper hall, received some orders concerning the preparation of food
which she proceeded to execute. The convalescent child rested well. The
sick woman passed from the first to the second stage of the disease
and was more quiet. The doctor came again after nightfall. He looked
at her charges wearily, and told Mildred that the master of the house
would not rally.
“He is my friend, and I can do no more for him,” he said, almost with
apathy.
The night passed as even nights in sick-rooms will, and at last it
began to grow toward day. The nurse became suddenly conscious of deadly
weariness and need of rest. She called the servant and left her in
charge, with a few directions and the injunction to call her at need,
and then stole down the stairs to snatch, before she rested, the breath
of morning air she craved.
As she stood at the veranda’s edge in the twilight coolness and
twilight hush watching the whitening sky, there came steps behind her,
and turning, she came face to face with Neil Hardesty. She stared at
him with unbelieving eyes.
“Yes, it is I,” he said.
“You were with Mr. Leroy?” she asked. “Are you going?”
“My work is over here,” he answered, quietly. “I am going to send--some
one else.”
She bent her head a second’s space with the swift passing courtesy
paid death by those to whom it has become a more familiar friend than
life itself, then lifted it, and for a minute they surveyed each other
gravely.
“This is like meeting you on the other side of the grave,” she said.
“How came you here? I thought you were in California.”
“I thought you were in Europe.”
“I was for awhile, but there was nothing there I wanted. Then I came
back and entered the training school. After this is over I have
arranged to join the sisterhood of St. Margaret. I think I can do
better work so.”
“Let me advise you not to mistake your destiny. You were surely meant
for the life of home and society, and can do a thousand-fold more good
that way.”
“You do not know,” she answered, simply. “I am very happy in my life.
It suits me utterly. I have never been so perfectly at peace.”
“But it will wear you out,” he murmured.
She looked at him out of her great eyes, surprisedly. It was a look he
knew of old.
“Why, I expect it to,” she answered.
There was a little silence before she went on, apparently without
effort:
“I am glad to come across you again, for there is one thing I have
wanted to say to you almost ever since we parted, and it has grieved me
to think I might never be able to say it. It is this. While I do not
regret anything else, and while I am sure now that it was best for both
of us--or else it would not have happened--I have always been sorry
that the break between us came in the way it did. I regret that. It
hurts me still when I remember of what I accused you. I am sure I was
unjust. No wonder you were bitter against me. I have often prayed that
that bitterness might pass out of your soul, and that I might know it.
So--I ask your forgiveness for my suspicion. It will make me happier to
know you have quite forgiven me.”
He did not answer. She waited patiently.
“Surely”--she spoke with pained surprise--“surely you can forgive me
now?”
“_Oh, God!_”
She looked at his set face uncomprehending. Why should it be with such
a mighty effort that he unclosed his lips at last? His voice came
forced and hard.
“I--I did it, Mildred. I was the coward that you thought me. I don’t
know what insensate fear came over me and took possession of me
utterly, but it was nothing to the fear I felt afterwards--for those
two weeks--that you might suspect me of it. And when I knew you did I
was mad with grief and anger at myself, and yet--it seems to me below
contempt--I tried to save my miserable pride. But I have always meant
that you should know at last.”
She looked at him with blank uncomprehension.
“I did it,” he repeated, doggedly, and waited for the change he thought
to see upon her face. It came, but with a difference.
“You--you did it?” for the idea made its way but slowly to her mind.
“Then”--with a rush of feeling that she hardly understood, and an
impetuous, tender gesture--“then let me comfort you.”
It was the voice of the woman who had loved him, and not of any Sister
of Charity, however gracious, that he heard again, but he turned
sharply away.
“God forbid,” he said, and she shrank from the misery in his voice;
“God forbid that even you should take away my punishment. Don’t you
see? It is all the comfort I dare have, to go where there is danger and
to face death when I can, till the day comes when I am not afraid, for
I am a coward yet.”