ON SMOKEY MOUNTAIN
Jessica bore back from the town that afternoon a spirit of tremulous
gladness. In the few moments of that thrilling ride and rescue, a
mysterious change had been wrought in her.
In the past days her soul had been possessed by a painful agitation
which she did not attempt to analyze. At moments the ingrained hatred of
Hugh's act, the resentment that had been the result of that year of
pain, had risen to battle for the inherent justice of things. At such
times she was restless and _distraite_, sitting much alone, and puzzling
David Stires by meaningless responses.
She could not tell him that the son whose name he never took upon his
lips was so near: that he whose crime his father's pride of name had
hidden, through all the months since then, had gone down with the
current, shunned by honest folk, adding to his one dismal act the weight
of persistent repetition! She could not tell him this, even though that
son now lived without memory of the evil he had done; though he
struggled under a cloud of hatred, reaching out to clean deed and high
resolve.
Now, however, all distrust and trepidation had vanished. Strangely and
suddenly the complex warfare in her mind had stilled. Standing with Mrs.
Halloran, she had listened to the comment with shining eyes. Not that
she distinguished any sudden and violent _volte-face_ of opinion to turn
persecution to popularity and make the reprobate of to-day the favorite
of to-morrow. But in its very reserve she instinctively felt a new
tension of respect. Suspicion and dislike aside, there was none there
who would again hinder the man who had made that race with death!
For her own part, she only knew that she had no longer fear of soul or
sense of irrevocable loss, or suffering. What were those old Bible words
about being born again? What was that rebirth but a divine forgetting, a
wiping out, a "remembering no more?" If it was the memory of his shame
that had dragged him down, that memory was gone, perhaps for ever. The
Hugh she now loved was not the Hugh who had sinned!
She sat by David Stires that evening chatting gaily--he had been much
weaker and more nervous of late and she would not have him told of the
runaway--talking of cheerful things, radiating a glow from her own
happiness that warmed the softly-lighted sick-room. All the while her
heart was on the hillside where a rough cabin held him who embodied for
her all the mystery and meaning of life. By a kind of clairvoyance she
saw him sitting in the snug firelight, thinking perhaps of the instant
their eyes had met. She did not guess that for him that moment had held
an added pang.
So the hours had passed, and the sun, when it rose next day, shone on a
freshly created world. The wind no longer moaned for the lost legends of
the trees. There was a bloom on every flowering bush, a song in the
throat of every bird. She was full of new feelings that yielded in their
sway only to new problems that loomed on her mental horizon. As the
puzzle of the present cleared, the future was become the all-dominating
thing. She knew now that she had never hated, had never really ceased to
love. And Hugh? Love was not a mere product of times and places. It was
only the memory that was gone, his love lived on underneath. Surely that
was what the violin--what the look on his face had said! When the broken
chain was welded, he would know her! Would it be chance--some sudden
mental shock--that would furnish the clue? She had heard of such things.
But suppose he did not recover his memory. In the very nature of the
case, he must sometime learn the facts of his past. Was it not better to
know the very worst it contained now, to put all behind him, and face a
future that held no hidden menace? She alone could tell him what had
clouded his career--the thing whose sign and symbol was the forged
draft. She carried the slip of paper in the bosom of her dress, and
every day she took it out and looked at it as at some maleficent relic.
It was a token of the old buried misery that, its final purpose
accomplished, should be forgotten for ever. How to convey the truth with
as little pain as might be--this was the problem--and she had found the
solution. She would leave the draft secretly in the cabin, where he must
see it. It bore his own name, and the deadly word David Stires' cramped
fist had written across it, told its significant story. How it got there
Hugh would not question; it would be to him only a detail of his
forgotten life there.
She was glad when in the late afternoon Doctor Brent came for his chat
with David Stires, and the latter sent her out for a walk. It was a
garlanded day, a day of clear blue spaces between lavender clouds
lolling in the sky, and over all the late summer landscape a dull gold
wash of sun. There had long ceased to be for her any direction save
one--down the mountain road to where a rambling, overgrown path led to
the little grassy plateau with its jutting rock, which was her point of
observation. She did not keep to the main road, but chose a short-cut
through the thick underbrush that brought her more quickly to the Knob.
There she sat down, and, parting the bushes, peered through them.
All was quiet. No wisp of smoke curled from the cabin chimney, no work
was forward; for Harry had climbed far up the mountain, alone with his
thoughts. It was a favorable opportunity.
Jessica had the fateful draft in her hand as she ran quickly down the
trail and across the cleared space to the cabin door. It was wide open.
Peering warily she saw that both rooms were empty, and, with a guilty
last glance about her, she entered. A smile curved her lips as she saw
the plain neatness of the interior; the scoured cooking-utensils, the
coarse Mackinaw clothing hung from wooden pegs, the clean bacon
suspended from the rafters. A nail in the wall held an old violin, and
beneath it was a shelf of books.
To these, battered and dog-eared novels rescued from the mildewed litter
of the cabin, Harry had turned eagerly in the long evenings for lack of
mental pabulum. She took one from the meager row, and opened it
curiously. It was _David Copperfield_, and she saw with kindling
interest that heavy lines were drawn along certain of the pages. The
words that had been marked revealed to the loving woman something of his
soul.
She looked about her. Where should she put the draft? He had left a
marker in the book; he would open it again, no doubt. She laid the draft
between the printed leaves, beyond the marker. Then, replacing the
volume on the shelf, she ran from the door and hastened back up the
steep trail to the Knob.
Leaning back against the warm rock, lapped in the serene peacefulness of
the spot, Jessica fell into reverie. Never since her wedding-day had she
said to herself boldly: "I love him!"--never till yesterday. Now all was
changed. Her thought was a tremulous assurance: "I shall stay here near
him day after day, watching. Some day his memory will come back, and
then my love will comfort him. The town will forget it has hated, and
will come to honor him. Sometime, seeing how he is changed, his father
will forgive him and take him back, and we shall all three go home to
the white house in the aspens. If not, then my place will still be with
Hugh! Perhaps we shall live here. Perhaps a cabin like that will be
home, and I shall live with him, and work with him, and care for him."
Thus she dreamed--a new day-dream, unravaged by the sordid tests of
verity.
So absorbed was she that she did not hear a step approaching over the
springy moss--a sharply drawn breath, as the intruder stifled an
exclamation. She had drawn her handkerchief across her eyes against the
dancing glimmer of sunlight. Suddenly it dropped to her lap, and she
half turned.
In the instant of surprise, as Harry's look flashed into hers, a name
sprang unbidden to her lips--a name that struck his strained face to
sudden whiteness, ringing in his ears like the note of a sunken bell.
All that was clamoring in him for speech rushed into words.
"You call my name!" he cried. "You know me! Have I ever been 'Hugh' to
you? Is that what your look said to me? Is that why your face has
haunted me? Tell me, I pray you!"
She had struggled to her feet, her hands pressed to her bosom. The
surprise had swung her from her moorings. Her heart had been so full in
her self-communings that now, between the impulse toward revealment and
the warning of caution, she stood confused.
"I had never seen you in the town before that day," she said. "I am
stopping there"--she pointed to the ridge above, where the roof of the
sanatorium glistened in the sunlight. "I was at the hotel by merest
accident when--you played."
The light died in his eyes. He turned abruptly and stared across the
foliaged space. There was a moment's pause.
"Forgive me!" he said at length, in a voice curiously dull. "You must
think me a madman to be talking to you like this. To be sure, every one
knows me. It is not strange that you should have spoken my name. It was
a sudden impulse to which I yielded. I had imagined ... I had dreamed
... but no matter. Only, your face--that white band across your
eyes--your voice--they came to me like something far away that I have
known. I was mistaken. I was crazy to think that you--"
He stopped. A wave of sympathy passed over her. She felt a mad wish to
throw all aside, to cry to him: "You _did_ know me! You loved me once! I
am Jessica--I am your wife!" So intense was her emotion that it seemed
to her as if she had spoken his name again audibly, but her lips had not
moved, and the tap of a woodpecker on a near-by trunk sounded with harsh
distinctness.
"I have wanted to speak to you," she said, after an instant in which she
struggled for self-control. "You did a brave thing yesterday--a
splendid thing. It saved me from sorrow all my life!"
He put aside her thanks with a gesture. "You saved me also. You found me
ill and suffering and your horse carried me to my cabin."
"I want to tell you," she went on hastily, her fingers lacing, "that I
do not judge you as others do. I know about your past life--what you
have forgotten. I know you have put it all behind you."
His face changed swiftly. To-day the determination with which he had
striven to put from his mind the problem of his clouded past had broken
down. In the light of the charge which had been flung in his teeth the
afternoon before, his imagination had dwelt intolerably on it. "Better
to have ended it all under the wheels of the freight-engine," he had
told himself. "What profit to have another character, if the old lies
chuckling in the shadow, an old-man-of-the-sea, a lurking thing, like a
personal devil, to pull me down!" In these gloomy reflections her
features had recurred with a painful persistence. He had had a bad
half-hour on the mountain, and now, before her look and tone, the
ever-torturing query burst its bonds.
"You know!" he said hoarsely. "Yet you say that? They stoned me in the
street the day I came back. Yesterday they counted me a thief. It is
like a hideous nightmare that I can't wake from. Who am I? Where did I
come from? I dare not ask, for fear of further shame! Can you imagine
what that means?"
He broke off, leaning an unsteady hand against a tree. "I've no excuse
for this raving!" he said, in a moment, his face turned away. "I have
seen you but twice. I do not even know your name. I am a man snatched
out of the limbo and dropped into hell, to watch the bright spirits
passing on the other side of the gulf!"
Pain lay very deep in the words, and it pierced her like a bodily pang,
so close did she seem to him in spirit. She felt in it unrest,
rebellion, the shrinking sensibility that had writhed in loneliness, and
the longing for new foothold on the submerged causeway of life.
She came close to him and touched his arm.
"I know all that you suffer," she said. "You are doing the strong thing,
the brave thing! The man in you is not astray now; it was lost, but it
has found its way back. When your memory comes, you will see that it is
fate that has been leading you. There was nothing in your past that can
not be buried and forgotten. What you have been you will never be again.
I know that! I saw you fight Devlin and I know why you did it. I heard
you play the violin! Whatever has been, I have faith in you now!"
She spoke breathlessly, in very abandon, carried away by her feeling. As
she spoke he had turned toward her, his paleness flushed, his eyes
leaping up like hungry fires, devouring her face. At the look timidity
rushed upon her. She stopped abruptly and took a startled step from him.
He turned from her instantly, his hands dropped at his sides. The word
that had almost sprung to speech had slipped back into the void.
"I thank you for the charity you have for me," he said, "which I in no
way deserve. I ... I shall always remember it."
She hesitated an instant, made as if to speak. Then, turning, she went
quickly from him. At the edge of the bushes she stopped with a sudden
impulse. She looked at the handkerchief she held in her hand. Some tiny
lettering was embroidered in its corner, the word _Jessica_. She looked
back--he had not moved. Rolling it into a ball, she threw it back, over
the bushes, then ran on hastily through the trees.
After a time Harry turned slowly, his shoulders lifting in a deep
respiration. He drew his hand across his brow as though to dispel a
vision. This was the first time he had hit upon the place. He saw the
flat ledge, with the bushes twisted before it for a screen. She had
known the place before, then! The white and filmy cambric caught his
eye, lying at the base of the great, knob-like rock. He went to it,
picked it up, and looked at it closely.
"Jessica!" he whispered. The name clung about him; the very leaves
repeated it in music. He had a curious sensation as if, while she spoke,
that very name had half framed itself in some curtained recess of his
thought. He pressed the handkerchief to his face. The faint perfume it
exhaled, like the dust of dead roses, gave him a ghostly impression of
the familiar.
He thought of what she had said; she had not known him! And yet that
look, the strange dreaming sense of her presence, his name on her lips
in the moment of bewilderment!
He struck his forehead sharply with his open hand.
"Fool!" he said, with a bitter laugh. "Fool!"