MRS. HALLORAN TELLS A STORY
From the moment her kiss fell upon the forehead of the delirious man in
the cabin, Jessica began to be a prey to new emotions, the significance
of which she did not comprehend. She was no longer a child; she had
attained to womanhood on that summer's wedding-day that seemed so far
away. But her woman's heart was untried, and it felt itself opening to
this new experience with a strange confusion.
That kiss, she told herself that night, had been given to her dead
ideal, that had lain there in its purifying grave-clothes of
forgetfulness. Yet it burned on her lips, as that other kiss in a
darkened room had burned afterward, but with a sense of pleasure, not of
hurt. It took her back into crimson meadows with her lost girlhood and
its opaled outlook--and Hugh. Then the warring emotions racked her
again; she felt a whirl of anger at herself, of hot impatience, of
mortification, of self-pity, and of stifled longing for she knew not
what.
But largest of all in her mind next day was anxiety. She must know how
he fared. In the open daylight she could not approach the cabin, but she
reflected that the doctor had been there, and no doubt had carried some
report of him to the town. So, as the morning grew, she rode down the
mountain, ostensibly to get the cherry cordial she had left behind her
the day before--really to satisfy her hunger for news.
As it happened, Mrs. Halloran's first greeting set her anxiety at rest.
Prendergast had bought some tobacco at the general store an hour before,
while she had been making her daily order, and the store-keeper had
questioned him. Prendergast had a fawning liking for the notice of his
fellows--save for his saloon cronies, few enough in the town, where it
was currently reported that he had a prison record in Arkansas, ever
exchanged more than a nod with him--and he had responded eagerly to the
civil inquiries. To an interested audience he had told of the finding of
Hugh on the mountain road in a sort of crazy fever, and enlarged upon
the part the girl on horseback had played. Hugh was all right now, he
said, except that he didn't remember him, or the cabin, or Smoky
Mountain.
Here was new interest. Though her name was known to few, Jessica had
come to be a familiar figure on the streets--she was the only lady rider
the place knew--and the description was readily recognizable without
the name which Mrs. Halloran supplied. In an hour the story had found a
hundred listeners, and as Jessica rode by that day, many a passer-by had
turned to gaze after her.
What Prendergast had said Mrs. Halloran told her in a breath. Before she
finished she found that Jessica had not heard of the incident in the
saloon which had precipitated the fight with Devlin, and with
sympathetic rhetoric Mrs. Halloran told this, too.
"He deserved it, ye see, dearie," she finished. "But no less was it a
brave thing that--what ye did last night, alone on the mountain with
them two, an' countin' yerself as safe as if ye were in God's pocket! To
hear that scalawag Prendergast talk, he's been Hugh Stires' good
angel--the oily hypocrite! An' do ye think it's true that he's lost his
memory--Stires, I mean--an' don't know nothin' that's ever happened with
him? Could that be, do ye think?"
"I've often heard of such a thing, Mrs. Halloran," responded Jessica.
Her heart was throbbing painfully. "But why does Smoky Mountain hate him
so? What has he done?"
Mrs. Halloran shook her head. "I never knew anything myself," she said
judiciously. "I reckon the town allus counted him just a general
low-down. The rest is only suspicion an' give the dog a bad name."
There had been comfort for Jessica in this interview. The burden of that
illness off her mind--she had not realized how great a load this had
been till it was lifted--she turned eagerly toward this rift in the
cloud of infamy that seemed to envelop the reputation of the man whose
life her own had again so strangely touched. She was feeling a new
kinship with the town; it was now not alone a spot upon which she had
loved to gaze from the height; it was the place wherein the man she had
once loved had lived and moved.
Mrs. Halloran's story had materially increased the poignant force of her
pity. What had seemed to her a vulgar brawl, had been in reality a
courageous and unselfish championship of a defenseless outcast. Thinking
of this, the self-blame and contrition which she had felt when she
listened to the violin assailed her anew, till she seemed a very part of
the guilt, an equal sinner by omission.
Yet she rode homeward that day with almost a light heart.