THE AWAKENING
The man whose part the lawyer had taken had yielded to his touch almost
dazedly as the girl disappeared. The keen, pleasurable tang of danger
which had leaped in his blood when he faced the enmity of the crowded
street--the reckless zest with which he would have met any odds and any
outcome with the same smile, and gone down if need be fighting like the
tiger in the jungle--had been pierced through by that look from the
balcony. His poise for a puzzling moment had been shaken, his
self-command overthrown. Feeling a dull sense of anger at the curious
embarrassment upon him, he went slowly through the office to the desk,
and with his back to the room, lit a cigar.
The action was half mechanical, but to the men gathered at the windows,
as they got down from the chairs on which they had been standing,
interested spectators of the proceedings outside, it seemed a pose of
gratuitous insolence. Tom Felder, entering, saw it with something of
resentment.
"That was a close squeak," he said. "Do you realize that? In five
minutes more you'd have been handled a sight worse than you handled your
man, let me tell you!"
The man of no memories smiled, the same smile that had infuriated the
bar-room--and yet somehow it was more difficult to smile now.
"Is it possible," he asked, "that through an unlucky error I have
trounced the local archbishop?"
Felder looked at him narrowly. Beneath the sarcasm he distinguished
unfamiliarity, aloofness, a genuine astonishment. The appearance in the
person of Hugh Stires of the qualities of nerve and courage had
surprised him out of his usual indifference. The "tinhorn gambler" had
fought like a man. His present _sang-froid_ was as singular. Had he been
an absolute stranger in the town he might have acted and spoken no
differently. Felder's smooth-shaven, earnest face was puzzled as he
answered curtly:
"You've trounced a man who will remember it a long time."
"Ah?" said the man addressed easily. "He has a better memory than I,
then!"
He gazed over the heads of the silent roomful to the simmering street
where Devlin, with the aid of a supporting arm, was staggering into the
saloon in which his humiliation had begun. "They seem agitated," he
said. The feeling of embarrassment was passing, the old daring was
lifting. His glance, scanning the room, set itself on a shabby, blear
figure in the background, apologetic yet keenly and pridefully
interested. A whimsical light was in his eye. He crossed to him and,
reaching out his hand, drew the violin from under his arm.
"Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast," he said, and, opening
the door, he tucked the instrument under his chin and began to play.
What absolute contempt of danger, what insane prompting possessed him,
can scarcely be imagined. As he stood there on the threshold with that
veiled smile, he seemed utterly careless of consequence, beckoning
attack, flaunting an egregious impertinence in the face of anger and
dislike. Felder looked for a quick end to the folly, but he saw the men
in the street, even as they moved forward, waver and pause. With almost
the first note, it had come to them that they were hearing music such as
the squeaking fiddles of the dance-halls never knew. Those on the
opposite pavement crossed over, and men far down the street stood still
to listen.
More than the adept's cunning, that had at first tingled in his fingers
at sight of the instrument, was in Harry Sanderson's playing. The
violin had been the single passion which the old Satan Sanderson had
carried with him into the new career. The impulse to "soothe the savage
breast" had been a flare of the old character he had been reliving; but
the music, begun in bravado, swept him almost instantly beyond its
bounds. He had never been an indifferent performer; now he was playing
as he had never played in his life, with inspiration and abandon. There
was a diabolism in it. He had forgotten the fight, the crowd, his own
mocking mood. He had forgotten where he was. He was afloat on a
fluctuant tide of melody that was carrying him back--back--into the
far-away past--toward all that he had loved and lost!
"It's _Home, Sweet Home_," said Barney McGinn,--"no, it's _Annie
Laurie_. No, it's--hanged if I know what it is!"
The player himself could not have told him. He was in a kind of tranced
dream. The self-made music was calling with a sweet insistence to buried
things that were stirring from a long sleep. It sent a gulp into the
throat of more than one standing moveless in the street. It brought a
suspicious moisture to Tom Felder's eyes. It drew Mrs. Halloran from the
kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. It called to a girl who crouched
in the upper hall with her miserable face buried in her hands, drew her
down the stair to the office door, her eyes wide with a breathless
wonder, her face glistening with feeling.
From the balcony Jessica had witnessed the fight without understanding
its meaning. A fascination she could not gainsay had glued her eyes to
the struggle. It was he--it was the face she knew, seen but once for a
single moment in the hour of her marriage, but stamped indelibly upon
her memory. It was no longer smooth-shaven, and it was changed, evilly
changed. But it was the same! There was recklessness and mockery in it,
and yet strength, not weakness. Shunned and despised as he might be--the
chief actor, as it seemed to her, in a cheap and desperate bar-room
affray, a coarse affair of fisticuffs in the public street--yet there
was something intrepid in his bearing, something splendid in his
victory. In spite of the sharp, momentary sense of antagonism that had
bruised her inmost fiber, when the brutal bulk of his opponent fell she
could have wept with relief! Then, suddenly, she had found that look
chaining her own. It had given her a strange thrill, had both puzzled
and touched her. She had dragged her eyes away with a choking sensation,
a sense of helplessness and capture. When the violin sounded, a
resistless rush of feeling had swept her to the lower door, where she
stood behind the spectators, spellbound.
In the man who played, weird forces were contending. The feel of the
polished wood on his cheek, the odor of the resined catgut in his
nostrils, were plucking, plucking at the closed door. A new note crept
to the strings. They had spoken pathos--now they told of pain. All the
struggle whose very meaning was forgotten, the unrequital, the baffled
quest, the longing of that last year which had been born of a woman's
kiss in a darkened room, never voiced in that lost life, poured forth
broken, inarticulate.
To Jessica, standing with hands close-clasped, it seemed the agony of
remorse for a past fall, the cry of a forlorn soul, knowing itself cast
out, appealing to its good angel for pity and pardon. Hugh had often
played to her, lightly, carelessly, as he did all things. She had deemed
it only one of his many clever, amateurish accomplishments. Now it
struck her with a pang that there had been in him a deeper side that she
had not guessed. Since her wedding-day she had thought of her marriage
as a loathed bond, from which his false pretense had absolved her. Now a
doubt of her own position assailed her. Had loneliness and outlawry
driven him into the career that had made him shunned even in this rough
town--a course which she, had she been faithful to her vow "for better,
for worse," might have turned to his redemption? God forgave, but she
had not forgiven! Smarting tears scorched her eyelids.
For Harry Sanderson the music was the imprisoned memory, crying out
strongly in the first tongue it had found. But the ear was alien, the
mind knew no by-path of understanding. It was a blind wave, feeling
round some under-sea cavern of suffering. Beneath the pressure the
closed door yielded, though it did not wholly open. The past with its
memories remained hidden, but through the rift, miraculously called by
the melody, the real character that had been the Reverend Henry
Sanderson came forth. The perplexed phantom that had been moving down
the natural declivity of resurrected predisposition, fell away. The
slumbering qualities that had stirred uneasily at sight of the face on
the balcony, awoke. Who he was and had been he knew no more than before;
but the new writhing self-consciousness, starting from its sleep, with
almost a sense of shock, became conscious of the gaping crowd, the dusty
street, the red sunset, and of himself at the end of a vulgar brawl,
sawing a violin in silly braggadocio in a hotel doorway.
The music faltered and broke off. The bow dropped at his feet. He picked
it up fumblingly and turned back into the office, as a man entered from
a rear door. The new-comer was Michael Halloran, the hotel's proprietor,
short, thick-set and surly. Asleep in his room, he had neither seen the
fracas nor heard the playing. He saw instantly, however, that something
unusual was forward, and, blinking on the threshold, caught sight of the
man who was handing the violin back to its owner. He clenched his fist
with a scowl and started toward him.
His wife caught his arm.
"Oh, Michael, Michael!" she cried. "Say nothing, lad! Ye should have
heard him play!"
"Play!" he exclaimed. "Let him go fiddle to his side-partner Prendergast
and the other riffraff he's run with the year past!" He turned blackly
to Harry. "Take yourself from this house, Hugh Stires!" he said.
"Whether all's true that's said of you I don't say, but you'll not come
here!"
Harry had turned very white. With the spoken name--a name how
familiar!--his eyes had fallen to the ring on his finger--the ring with
the initials H. S. A sudden comprehension had darted to his mind. A
score of circumstances that had seemed odd stood out now in a baleful
light. The looks of dislike in the bar-room--the attitude of the
street--this angry diatribe--all smacked of acquaintance, and not alone
acquaintance, but obloquy. His name was Hugh Stires! He belonged to
this very town! And he was a man hated, despised, forbidden entrance to
an uncouth hostelry, an unwelcome visitant even in a bar-room!
An hour earlier the discovery would not so have appalled him. But the
violin music, in the emergence of the real Harry Sanderson, had, as it
were, flushed the mind of its turgid silt of devil-may-care and left it
quick and quivering. He turned to Felder and said in a low voice--to
him, not to the hotel-keeper, or to the roomful:
"When I entered this town to-day, I did not know my name, or that I had
ever set foot in it before. I was struck by a train a month ago, and
remember nothing beyond that time. It seems that the town knows me
better than I know myself."
Halloran looked about him with a laugh of derision and incredulity, but
few joined in it. Those who had heard the playing realized that in some
eerie way the personality of the man they had known had been altered.
Before the painful, shocked intensity of his face, the lawyer felt his
instant skepticism fraying. This was little like acting! He felt an
inclination to hold out his hand, but something held him back.
Harry Sanderson turned quietly and walked out of the door. Pavement and
street were a hubbub of excited talk. The groups parted as he came out,
and he passed between them with eyes straight before him.
As he turned down the street, a fragment of quartz, thrown with
deliberate and venomous aim, flew from the saloon doorway. It grazed his
head, knocking off his hat.
Tom Felder had seen the flying missile, and he leaped to the center of
the street with rage in his heart. "If I find out who threw that," he
said, "I'll send him up for it, so help me God!"
Harry stooped and picked up his hat, and as he put it on again, turned a
moment toward the crowd. Then he walked on, down the middle of the
street, his eyes glaring, his face white, into the dusky blue of the
falling twilight.