THE MAN WHO HAD FORGOTTEN
If the man who had been the subject of the observations Jessica had
heard had been less absorbed, as he walked leisurely along on the
opposite side of the street, he would have noticed the look of dislike
in the eyes of those he passed. They drew away from him, and one
spoke--to no one in particular and with an oath offensive and fervid.
But weather-beaten, tanned, indifferently clad, and with a small brown
dog following him, the new-comer passed along, oblivious to the sidelong
scrutiny. He did not stare about him after the manner of a stranger,
though, so far as he knew, he had never been in the place before. So far
as he knew--for Harry Sanderson had no memories save those which had
begun on a certain day a month before in a box-car. He walked with eyes
on the pavement, absorbed in thoughts of his own.
But Harry Sanderson now was not the man who had ridden into oblivion in
the motor-car. The rector of St. James was in a strange eclipse.
Mentally and externally he had reverted to the old Satan Sanderson, of
the brilliant flashing originality, of the curt risk and daring. The
deeply human and sensitive side, that had developed during his divinity
years, was in abeyance; it showed itself only in the affection he
bestowed on the little nameless dog that followed him like a brown,
shaggy shadow.
He was like that old self of his, and yet, if he had but known it, he
was wonderfully like some one else, too--some one who had belonged to
the long ago and garbled past that still eluded him; some one who had
been a part also of the life of this very town, till a little over a
month before, when he had left it with dread dogging his footsteps!
Curious coincidences had wrought together for this likeness. In the past
weeks Harry had grown perceptibly thinner. A spare beard was now on his
chin, and the fiery sun that had darkened his cheeks to sallow had
lightened his brown hair a shade. The cut on his brow had healed to the
semblance of a thin red birth-mark. Most of all, the renaissance of the
old character had given his look, to the casual eye, a certain flare and
jauntiness, which dissipation and license, unclogged now with memory or
compunction, had matured and vitalized. His was now a replica of the
face he had once seen, in that lost life of his, mirrored in his chapel
study--his own face, with the trail of evil upon it, and yet weirdly
like Hugh Stires'.
Fate--or God!--was doing strange things for Harry Sanderson!
Harry's game of cards in the freight-car had been a sequent of the game
in the chapel. It was an instinctive effort of the newly-stirring
consciousness to relink the broken chain, utilizing the mental formula
which had been stamped deeply upon it when the curtain of oblivion
descended--which had persisted, as the photograph of the dead retina
shows the scene upon which the living eye last looked. The weeks that
followed were reversionary. Rebellion against convention,
dissipation--these had been the mask through which the odd temperament
of Satan Sanderson had looked at life. This mask had fallen before a
career of new meanings and motives. These blotted suddenly out with
their inspirations and habits, and, the old spring touched, the mind had
automatically resumed its old viewpoint.
He had studied himself with a sardonic, _ex parte_ interest. He had
found at his disposal a well-stocked mind, a copious vocabulary. Terms
of science, historic references, the thousand and one allusions of the
daily newspaper that the unlearned pass over, all had their
significance for him. He was no superficial observer, and readily
recognized the evidences of mental culture. But the cord that had bound
all together into character had snapped. He was a ship without a rudder;
a derelict, drifting with the avid winds of chance on the tide of fate.
A thousand ways he had turned and turned. A thousand tricks he had tried
to cajole the unwilling memory. All were vain. When he had awakened in
the freight-car, many miles had lain between him and his vanished
history, between him and St. James parish, the town he had impressed,
the desolate white house in the aspens, the chapel service and surplice,
and the swift and secret-keeping river. Between him and all that these
things had meant, there lay a gulf of silence and blankness as wide as
infinity itself.
But drifting, adventuring, blown by the gipsy wind of chance, learning
the alphabet and the rule of three of "the road," the man was at once a
part of it and apart from it. The side that rejoiced in the liberty and
madcap adventure was overlaid by another darkling side whose fingers
were ever feeling for the lost latch. In the nomad weeks of wind and
sun, as the tissues of the brain grew slowly back to a state of normal
action, the mind seized again and again upon the bitter question of his
identity. It had obtruded into clicking leagues on steel-rails, into
miles afoot by fruit-hung lanes, on white Pacific shell-roads under
cedar branches, on busy highways. It had stalked into days of labor in
hop-fields, work with hand and foot that brought dreamless sleep and
generous wage; into nights of less savory experience in city purlieus,
where a self-forgotten man gamed and drank, recklessly, audaciously,
forbiddingly. Who was he? From what equation of life had he been
eliminated? Had he loved anything or anybody? Had he a friend, any
friend, in the world? At first it was not often that he cared; only
occasionally some deep-rooted instinct would stir, subtly conscious,
without actual contrast, of the missed and evaded. But he came to ask it
no longer quizzically or sardonically, but gloomily and fiercely. And
lacking answer, the man of no yesterdays had plunged on toward the
ardent, alien to-morrow, and further into audacious folly. He had drunk
deeper, the sign-posts of warning were set in his countenance, and his
smile had grown as dangerous as a sunstroke.
The man of no memories gave no heed to the men on the street who looked
at him askance. He sauntered along unconsciously, his hands thrust deep
in his pockets. With a casual glance at the hotel across the way, he
entered a saloon, where a score of patrons were standing at the bar, or
shaking dice noisily at the tables ranged against the wall. The
bartender nodded to his greeting--the slightest possible nod. The dog
who had followed him into the place leaped up against him, its forepaws
on his knee.
"Brandy, if you please," said the new arrival, and poured indolently
from the bottle set before him.
The conversation in the room had chilled. To its occupants the man who
had entered was no stranger; he was Hugh Stires, returned unwelcome to a
place from which he had lately vanished. Moreover, what they felt for
him was not alone the crude hatred which the honest toiler feels for the
trickster who gains a living by devious knaveries. There was an uglier
suspicion afloat of Hugh Stires! A blue-shirted miner called gruffly for
his score, threw down the silver and went out, slamming the swing-door.
Another glowered at the new arrival, and ostentatiously drew his glass
farther along the bar.
The new-comer regarded none of them. He poured his glass slowly full,
sipped from it, and holding it in his hand, turned and glanced
deliberately about the place. He looked at everybody in the room,
suddenly sensible of the hostile atmosphere, with what seemed a careless
amusement. Then he raised his glass.
"Will you join me, gentlemen?" he said.
There was but one response. A soiled, shambling figure, blear,
white-haired and hesitating, with a battered violin under its arm,
slouched from a corner and grasped eagerly for the bottle the bartender
contemptuously pushed toward him. No one else moved.
The man who waited studied the roomful with a disdainful smile, with
eyes sparkling like steel points. He as wholly misunderstood their
dislike as they misconstrued his effrontery--did not guess that to them
he stood as one whom they had known and had good reason to despise.
Their attitude struck him as so manifestly unreasonable and absurd--so
primarily the sulky hatred of the laborious boor for the manifestly more
flippant member of society--that it diverted him. He had drunk at
bar-rooms in many strange places; never before had he encountered a
community like this. His veiled, insolent smile swept the room.
"A spirit of brotherhood almost Christian!" he said. "If I observe that
the town's brandy is of superior vintage to its breeding, let me not be
understood as complimenting the former without reservation. I have drunk
better brandy; I have never seen worse manners!"
He looked smilingly at the soiled figure beside him--a fragment of
flotsam tossed on the tide of failure. "I erred in my general
salutation," he said. "Gentility is, after all, less a habit than an
instinct." He lifted his glass--to the castaway. "I drink to the health
of the only other gentleman present," he said, and tossed the drink off.
A snort and a truculent shuffle came from the standing men. Their faces
were dark. Tom Felder, the lawyer, entered the saloon just in time to
see big Devlin, the owner of the corner dance-hall, rise from a table,
rolling up flannel sleeves along tattooed arms. He saw him stride
forward and, with a well-directed shove, send the shambling inebriate
reeling across the floor.
"Two curs at the bar are enough at a time!" quoth Devlin.
Then the lawyer saw an extraordinary thing. The emptied glass rang
sharply on the bar, the arm that held it straightened, the lithe form
behind it seemed to expand--and the big bulk of Devlin went backward
through the doorway, and collapsed in a sprawling heap on the pavement.
"For my part," said an even, infuriate voice from the threshold, "I
prefer but one."
The face the roomful saw now as they pushed to the outer air, and which
turned on the flocking crowd, bore anything but the slinking look they
had been used to see on the face of Hugh Stires. The smile that meant
danger played over it; there was both calculation and savagery in it. It
was the look of the man to whom all risks are alike, to whom nothing
counts. In the instant confusion, every one there recognized the element
of hardihood dumfounded. Here was one who, as Barney McGinn, the
freighter, said afterward, "hadn't the sand of a sick coyote," bearding
a bully and the most formidable antagonist the town afforded. Devlin
himself was not overpopular; his action had been plainly enough a play
to the galleries; and courage--that animal attribute which no
circumstance or condition can rob of due admiration--had appeared in an
unexpected quarter. But the man they despised had infuriated them with
insult, and Devlin had the sympathy that clings to a fair cause. An ugly
growl was running through the crowd, and several started forward. Even
when Tom Felder put up his hand with a sharp, indignant exclamation,
they fell back with an unwilling compulsion.
The prostrate man was on his feet in an instant, wiping the blood from a
cleft lip, and peeled off his vest with a vile epithet.
"That is incidentally a venturesome word to select from your
vocabulary," said the even voice, a sort of detonation in it. "You will
feel like apologizing presently."
Devlin came on with a bull-like rush. The lawyer's eye, shrewdly gaging
the situation, gave the slighter man short shrift, and for several
intense seconds every breath stopped. Those seconds called up from some
mysterious covert all the skill and strength of the old hard-hitting
Satan Sanderson, all the science of parry and feint learned in those
bluff college bouts with the gloves with Gentleman Jim. And this hidden
reserve rushed into combat with an avid thirst and wild ferocity as
strange as the steady eye and hand that cloaked them beneath a sardonic
coolness.
It was a short, sharp contest. Not a blow broke the guard of the man
whose back was to the doorway--on the other hand, Devlin's face was
puffed and bleeding. When for a breath he drew back, gulping, a sudden
glint of doubt and fear had slipped beneath the blood and sweat.
The end came quickly. Harry stepped to meet him, there was a series of
swift passes--then one, two, lightning-like blows, and Devlin went down
white and stunned in the dust of the roadway.
So high was the tension and so instantaneous the close, that for a
moment the crowd was noiseless, the spell still upon them. In that
moment Tom Felder came hastily forward, for, though sharing the general
dislike, admiration was strong in him, and, knowing the temper of the
bystanders, he expected trouble.
The man who had administered Devlin's punishment, however, did not see
his approach. He was looking somewhere above their heads--at the upper
balcony of the hotel opposite--staring, in a kind of strained and
horrified expectancy, at a girl who leaned forward, her hands clenching
the balustrade, her eyes fixed on his face. The late sunlight on her
hair made it gleam like burnished copper over her green riding-habit,
and her cheeks were blanched.
There was something in that face, in that intense look, that seemed to
cleave the gray veil that swathed Harry Sanderson's past. Somewhere,
buried in some cell of his brain, a forgotten memory tugged at its
shackles--a memory of a time when, thousands and thousands of years ago,
he had been something more than the initials "H. S." The look pierced
through the daredevil present in which the mind astray had roved
reckless and insensate, to a deeper stratum in which slept maturer
qualities of refined taste, of dignity and of repute. It stripped off
the protecting cicatrice and left him enveloped in an odd embarrassment.
A flush burned his face.
Only an instant the gaze hung between them. It served as a distraction,
for other eyes had raced to the balcony. Loud voices were suddenly
hushed, for there was not wanting in the crowd that instinctive regard
for the proprieties which belongs to communities where gentlewomen are
few. In that instant Felder put his hand on the arm of the staring man
and drew him to the door of the hotel.
"Inside, quickly!" he said under his breath, for a rumble from the crowd
told him the girl had left the balcony above. He pushed the other
through the doorway and turned for a second on the threshold.
"Whatever private feelings you may have," he said in a tone that all
heard, "don't disgrace the town. Fair play--no matter who he is! McGinn,
I should think you, at least, were big enough to settle your grudges
without the help of a crowd."
The freighter reddened angrily for a second, then with a shame-faced
laugh, shrugged his shoulders and turned away. The lawyer went in,
shutting the hotel door behind him.