THE WOMAN WHO REMEMBERED
Since that tragical wedding-day at the white house in the aspens,
Jessica had passed through a confusion of experiences. She had always
lived much in herself, and to her natural reserve her blindness had
added. As a result her knowledge both of herself and of life had been
superficial. She had been drawn to Hugh by both the weakest and the
noblest in her, in a self-obliterating worship that had counted her
restored sight only an ornament and glory for her love. In the baleful
hour of enlightenment she had been lost, whirled away, out into the
storm and void, every landmark gone, every light extinguished, her feet
set in the "abomination of desolation." The first bitter shock of the
catastrophe, however, seemed to burn up in her the very capacity for
further poignant suffering, and she went through the motions of life
apathetically.
Change of scene and the declining health of David Stires occupied,
fortunately, much of her waking thoughts. After the first few months of
travel he failed steadily. His citric-acid moods were forgotten, his
harsh tempers put aside. Hour after hour he lay in his chair, gazing out
from the wide sun parlor of the sanatorium on the crest of Smoky
Mountain, whither their journeying had finally brought them. He had
never spoken of Hugh. But Jessica, sitting each day beside him, reading
to him till he dropped asleep, seeing the ever-increasing sadness in his
face, knew the hidden canker that gnawed his heart.
To the northward the slope of the mountain fell gradually to fields of
violet-eyed alfalfa, and twice a day a self-important little
donkey-engine drew a single car up and down between the great glass
building on the ridge and the junction of the northern railroad. This
view did not attract her; she liked best the southern exposure, with its
flushed, serrated snow-peaks in the distance, the warmer brown shadows
of the gulch-seamed hills unrolling at her feet, and at their base the
treeless, busy little county-seat two miles away. In time her fiercer
pain had dulled, and her imagination--naturally so importunate--had
begun to seize upon her surroundings. In the summer season the
sanatorium had few guests, and for this she was thankful. Doctor Brent,
its head, rallying her on her paleness, drove her out of doors with
good-natured severity, and when she was not with David Stires she
walked or rode for hours at a time over the mountain trails. Breathing
in the crisp air of altitude her spirits grew more buoyant. The beauty
of shrub and flower, of cloud and sky, began to call to her, and the
breath of October found a tinge of color in her cheek. She fed the
squirrels, listened to the pert chirp of the whisky-jack and the
whirring drum of the partridge, or sat on a hidden elevation which she
named "The Knob," facing across the shallow valley to the south.
The Knob overlooked a little grassy shelf a few hundred feet below,
where stood a miner's cabin, with weed-grown gravel heaps near by, in
front of which a tree bore the legend, painted roughly on a board: "The
Little Paymaster Claim." From its point of vantage, too, unobserved, she
could look down into the gulch far below, where yellowish-brown cones
reared like gigantic ant-hills--the ear-marks of the placer miner--and
gray streaks indicated the flumes in which, by tortuous meanderings, the
water descended to do its work in the sluices. She could even watch the
toiling miners, hoisting the gravel by windlasses, or shovelling it into
the long narrow boxes through which the foaming water raced. So limpid
was the air that in the little town she could distinguish each several
building lining the single straight street--a familiar succession of
gilded cafe, general emporium and drug store, with the dull terra cotta
"depot" at one end, and on the other, on a sunburned acre of its own,
the glaring white court-house, flanked by the post-office and the jail.
She could see the clouds of dust, the wagons hitched at the curb and the
drab figures grouped at the corners or passing in and out of doorways.
Her interest had opened eagerly to these scenes. The solitudes soothed
and the life of the community below, frankly primitive and
uncomplicated, attracted her. Between the town of Smoky Mountain and the
expensive sanatorium on the ridge a great social gulf was fixed; the
latter's patrons for the most part came and went by the narrow-gage road
that linked with the northern junction; the settlement far below was
only a feature of the panorama for which they paid so well. Even Doctor
Brent--who had perched this place of healing where his patients could
breathe air fresh from the Pacific and cooled by the snow-peaks--knew it
chiefly through two of its citizens, Mrs. Halloran, the capable,
bustling wife of the proprietor of the Mountain Valley House, the town's
single hostelry, who brewed old-fashioned blackberry wine and cordials
for his patients, and Tom Felder, a young lawyer whom he had known on
the coast before ill health had sent him to hang out his shingle in a
more genial altitude.
The latter sometimes came for a chat with the physician, and on one of
these calls Jessica and he had met. She had liked his keen, good-humored
face and waving, slightly graying hair. She had met him once since on
the mountain road, and he had walked with her and told her quaint
stories of the townspeople. She did not guess that more than once since
then he had walked there hoping to meet her again. He had taken her to
Mrs. Halloran, whose heart she had won by praise of her cherry cordial.
As Mrs. Halloran said afterward: "'Twas no flirt with the bottle and
make love to the spoon! She ain't a bit set up. Take the word I give
you, Tom Felder, an' go and swap lies with the doctor at the santaranium
soon again. Ye can do worse."
This had been Jessica's first near acquaintance with the town, but since
that time she had often reined up at the door of the neat hotel to pass
a word with Mrs. Halloran or to ask for another bottle of the cherry
cordial, which the sick man she daily tended found grateful to his jaded
palate.
"It brings back my boyhood," David Stires said to her one afternoon,
tapping the bottle by his wheel-chair. "That was before the chemist
married the vintner's daughter. Somehow this has the old taste."
"It is nearly gone," she said. "I'll get another bottle--I am going for
a ride now. I think it does you good."
"Before you go," he said, "fetch my writing-case and I will dictate a
letter."
She brought and opened it with a trouble at her heart, for the request
showed his increasing weakness. Until to-day the few letters he had
written had been done with his own hand. Thinking of this as she waited,
her fingers nervously plucked at the inside of the leather cover. The
morocco flap fell and disclosed a slip of paper. It was a canceled
bank-draft. It bore Hugh's name, and across its face, in David Stires'
crabbed hand, written large, was the venomous word _Forgery_.
The room swam before her eyes. Only by a fierce effort could she compel
her pen to trace the dictated words. Hugh's misdeed, evil as it was, had
been to her but an abstract crime; now it suddenly lay bare before her,
a concrete expression of coarse thievery, a living symbol of crafty
simulation. Scarce knowing why she did it, she drew the draft covertly
from its receptacle, and slipped it into her bosom. Her fingers trembled
as they replaced the flap, and her face was pale when she put away the
writing-case and went to don her habit.
The evidence of Hugh's sin! As the horse pounded down the winding road,
she held her hand hard against her breast, as though it were a live coal
that she would press into her flesh in self-torture. That paper must
remain, as the sin that made it remained--the sign-manual of her
dishonor and loss! The man whose hand had penned its lying signature was
the man she had thought she loved. By that act he had thrust himself
from her for ever. Yet he lived. Somewhere in the world he walked, in
shame and degradation, beyond the pale of honorable living--and she was
his wife!
_She was his wife!_ The words hummed in the hoof-beats and taunted her.
The odors of the balsam boughs about her became all at once the scent of
jasmin, the sigh of the wind turned to the chanting of choir voices, and
beneath her closed eyelids came a face seen but once, but never to be
erased or forgotten, a face startled, quivering with a strange,
remorseful flush--which she had not guessed was guilt!
_She was his wife!_ Though she called herself Jessica Holme, yet, in the
law, his name and fame were hers. There was deep in her the unreasoned,
intuitive regard, handed down through inflexible feminine generations,
for the relentless mandate, "let not man put asunder;" but she had no
finical conception of woman's duty to convention. To break the bond? To
divorce the husband to whom she was wife in name only? That would be to
spread abroad the disgrace under which she cringed! She thought of the
old man she had left--uncomplaining, growing feebler every day. To shame
him before the world, whose ancestors had been upright and clean-handed?
To add the final sting to his sufferings--who had done her only good?
No, she could not do that. Time must solve the problem for her in some
other way.
The main street of the town was busy, yet quiet withal, with the
peculiar quiet which marks the absence of cobblestone and trolley-bell.
Farmers from outlying fruit ranches gossiped on the court-house square;
here and there a linen collar and white straw hat betokened the
professional man or drummer; and miners in overalls and thong-laced
boots kept a-swing the rattan half-doors of the saloons.
"Look at that steady hand, now, an' her hair as red as glory!" said Mrs.
Halloran, gazing admiringly from the doorstep where she had been
chatting with Tom Felder. "Ye needn't stare yer gray eyes out though, or
she'll stop at th' joolry shop to buy ye a ring--to shame ye fer jest
hankerin' and sayin' nothin'!"
Felder laughed as he crossed the street, raising his felt hat gallantly
to the approaching rider. Mrs. Halloran was a privileged character. The
ravage of drudgery had not robbed her of comeliness that gave her face
an Indian summer charm, and she was as kindly as her husband was morose.
It was not Michael Halloran who kept the Mountain Valley House popular!
The old woman hurried to the curb and tied the horse as Jessica
dismounted.
"How did ye guess I made some more this day?" she exclaimed. "Sure, if
ye drink it yerself, my dearie, them cheeks is all th' trade-mark I
need!" She led the way into the little carpeted side room, by courtesy
denominated "the parlor." "I'll go an' put it up in two shakes," she
said. "Sit ye down an' I'll not be ten minutes." So saying she bustled
away.
Left alone, Jessica gazed abstractedly about her. Her mind was still
full of the painful reflections of her ride. A door opened from the room
into the office. It was ajar; she stepped close and looked in.
A group of miners lounged in the space before the front
windows--familiarly referred to by its habitues as "the Amen
Corner"--chatting and watching the passers-by.
Suddenly she clapped her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. A name had
been spoken--the name that was in her thought--the name of "Hugh
Stires." She leaned forward, listening breathlessly.
"I wonder where the young blackleg's been," said one, peering through
the windows. "He'd better have stayed away for good, I'm thinking. What
does he want to come back for, to a place where there aren't three men
who will take a drink with him?"
The reply was as contemptuous.
"We get some rare black sheep in the hills!" The voice spoke meaningly.
"If I had my way, he'd leave this region almighty quick!"
Jessica looked about her an instant wildly, guiltily. She could not be
mistaken in the name! Was Hugh here, whither by the veriest accident she
had come--here in this very town that she had gazed down upon every day
for weeks? _Was he?_ She pressed her cold hands to her colder cheeks.
The contempt in the voices had smitten through her like a sword.
A revulsion seized her. No, no, it could not be! She had not heard
aright. It was only a fancy! But she had an overwhelming desire to
satisfy herself with her own eyes. From where she stood she could not
see the street. She bethought herself of the upper balcony.
Swiftly, on tiptoe, she crossed to the hall door, threw it open, and ran
hastily up the stair.