INTO THE GOLDEN SUNSET
It was a fair, sweet evening, and the room where Jessica sat beside
David Stires' bed, reading aloud to him, was flooded with the failing
sunlight. The height was still in brightness, but the gulches below were
wine-red and on their rims the spruces stood shadow-straight against the
golden ivory of the southern sky. Since the old man's seizure in the
night he had been much worse and she had scarcely left his room. To-day,
however, he had sat propped by pillows, able to read and chat, and the
deep personal anxiety that had numbed her had yielded. She was reading
now from a life of that poetess whose grave has made a lonely Colorado
mountain a place of pilgrimage. She read in a low voice, holding the
page to the dimming light:
"The spot she chose was a bare knoll, facing out across the curved
chasm, the wide empty gulf on three sides, a plot hounded by a knot
of noble trees that whispered softly together. Here above the sky
was beautifully blue, the searching fall wind that numbed the
fingers in the draw of the gorge was gone, and the warm sunshine
was mellow and pleasant. It was a spot to dream in, leaning upon
the great facts of God that He teaches best to those who love His
Nature. A spot in which to be laid at last for the long sleep, when
mortal dreams are over and work is done."
"That is beautiful," he said. "I should choose a spot like that." He
pointed down the long slope, where a red beam of the sun touched the
gray face of the Knob and turned it to a spot of crimson-lake. "That
must be such a place."
Her cheeks flushed. She knew what he was thinking. He would not wish to
lie in the far-away cemetery that looked down on the white house in the
aspens, the theater of his son's downfall! The Knob, she thought with a
thrill, overlooked the place of Hugh's regeneration.
A knock came at the door. It was a nurse with letters for him from the
mail, and while he opened them Jessica laid aside the book and went
slowly down the hall to the sun-parlor, where the doctor stood with the
group gathered after the early supper, chatting of the newest "strike"
on the mountain.
"We'll be famous if we keep on," he was saying, as she looked out of the
wide windows across the haze where the sunlight drifted down in dust of
gold. "I've a mind to stake out a claim myself."
"We pay you better," said one of the occupants grimly. "Anyway, the
whole of Smoky Mountain was staked in the excitement a year ago. There's
no doubt about this find, I suppose?"
"It's on exhibition at the bank," the doctor replied. "More than five
thousand dollars, _cached_ in a crevice in the glacial age, as neat as a
Christmas stocking!"
"Wish it was _my_ stocking," grunted the other. "It would help pay my
bill here."
The man of medicine laughed and nodded to Jessica where she stood, her
cheeks reddened by the crimsoning light. She had scarcely listened to
the chatter, or, if she did, paid little heed. All her thoughts were
with the man she loved. Watching the luminous purple shadows grow slowly
over the landscape, she longed to run down to the Knob, to sit where she
had first spoken to him, perhaps by very excess of yearning to call him
to her side. She had a keen sense of the compunction he must feel, and
longed, as love must, to reassure him.
The talk went on about her.
"Where is the lucky claim?" some one asked.
"Just below this ridge," the doctor replied. "It is called the 'Little
Paymaster.'"
The name caught her ear now. The Little Paymaster? That was the name on
the tree--on Hugh's claim! At that instant she thought she heard David
Stires calling. She turned and ran quickly up the long hall to his open
door.
The sight of his face at first startled her, for it was held captive of
emotion; but it was an emotion of joy, not of pain. A letter fluttered
in his grasp. He thrust it into her hands.
"Jessica!" he exclaimed. "Hugh has paid it! He has sent the five
thousand dollars, interest and principal, to the bank, to my account."
For a moment she stood transfixed. The talk she had mechanically heard
leaped into significance, and her mind ran back to the hour when she had
left the draft at the cabin. She caught the old man's hand and knelt by
his chair, laughing and crying at once.
"I knew--oh, I knew!" she cried, and hid her face in the coverlet.
"It is what I have prayed for," he said, after a moment, in a shaking
voice. "I said I hoped I would never see his face again, but I was
bitter then. He was my only son, after all, and he is your husband. I
have thought it all over lying here."
Jessica lifted her eyes, shining with a great thankfulness. During these
last few days the impulse to tell all that she had concealed had been
almost irresistible; now the barrier had fallen. The secret she had
repressed so long came forth in a rush of sentences that left him mute
and amazed.
"I should have told you before," she ended, "but I didn't know--I wasn't
sure--" She broke down for very joy.
He looked at her with eyes unnaturally bright. "Tell me everything,
Jessica!" he said. "Everything from the beginning!"
She drew the shade wider before the open window, where he could look
down across the two miles of darkening foliage to the far huddle of the
town--a group of toy houses now hazily indistinct--and, seated beside
him, his hand in hers, poured out the whole. She had never framed it
into words; she had pondered each incident severally, apart, as it were,
from its context. Now, with the loss of memory and the pitiful struggle
of recollection as a background, the narrative painted itself in vivid
colors to whose pathos and meaning her every instinct was alive. Her
first view of Hugh, the street fight and the revelation of the
violin--the part she and Prendergast had taken--the rescue of the
child--the leaving of the draft in the cabin, and the strange
sleep-walking that had so nearly found a dubious ending--she told all.
She did not realize that she was revealing the depths of her own heart
without reserve. If she omitted to tell of his evil reputation and the
neighborhood's hatred, who could blame? She was a woman, and she loved
them both.
Dusk came before the moving recital was finished. The rose of sunset
grew over the trellised west, faded, and the gloom deepened to darkness,
pricked by stars. The old man from the first had scarcely spoken. When
she ended she could hardly see his face, and waited anxiously to hear
what he might say. Presently he broke the silence.
"He was young and irresponsible, Jessica," he said. "Money always came
so easily. He didn't realize what he was doing when he signed that
draft. He has learned a lesson out in the world. It won't hurt his
career in the end, for no one but you and I and one other knows it.
Thank God! If his memory comes back--"
"Oh, it will!" she breathed. "It must! That day on the Knob he only
needed the clue! When I tell him who I am, he will know me. He will
remember it all. I am sure--sure! Will you let me bring him to you?" she
added softly.
"Yes," he said, pressing her hand, "to-morrow. I shall be stronger in
the morning."
She rose and lighted the lamp, shading it from his eyes.
"Do you remember the will, Jessica?" he asked her presently. "The will
I drew the day he came back? You never knew, but I signed it--the night
of your wedding. Harry Sanderson was right, my dear, wasn't he?
"I wish now I hadn't signed it, Jessica," he added. "I must set it
right--I must set it right!" He watched her with a smile on his face. "I
will rest now," he said, and she adjusted the pillows and turned the
lamp low.
Crossing the room, she stepped through the long window on to the porch,
and stood leaning on the railing. From the dark hedges where the brown
birds built came a drowsy twitter as from a nest of dreams. A long time
she stood there, a thousand thoughts busy in her brain--of Hugh, of the
beckoning future. She thought of the day she had destroyed the model
that her fingers longed to remold, now that the Prodigal was indeed
returned. The words of the biblical narrative flashed through her mind:
_And he arose and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way
off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his
neck, and kissed him._ So Hugh's father would meet him now! The dewed
odors of the jasmin brought the memory of that stormy night when he had
come to her in his sleep. She imagined she heard again his last
word--his whispered "Good-by" in the sound of the rain.
She thought it a memory, but the word that flashed into her mind was
carried to her from the shadow, where a man stood in the shrubbery
watching her dim figure and her face white and beautiful in the light
from a near-by window, with a passionate longing and rebellion.
Harry was seeing her, he told himself, for the last time. He had made up
his mind to this on that stormy morning when he had found the lucky
crevice. For days he had labored, spurred by a fierce haste to make
requital. Till the last ounce of the rich "pocket" had been washed, and
the whole taken to the bank in the town, no one had known of the find.
It had repaid the forgery and left him a handful of dollars over--enough
to take him far away from the only thing that made life worth the
effort. He had climbed to the ridge on the bare chance of seeing
Jessica--not of speaking to her. Watching her, it required all his
repression not to yield to the reckless desire that prompted him to go
to her, look into her eyes, and tell her he loved her. He made a step
forward, but stopped short, as she turned and vanished through the
window.
Standing on the porch, a gradual feeling of apprehension had come to
Jessica--an impression of blankness and chill that affected her
strangely. Inside the room she stood still, frightened at the sudden
sense of utter soundlessness.
She caught up the lamp, and, turning the wick, approached the bed. She
put out her hand and touched the wasted one on the coverlet. Then a
sobbing cry came from her lips.
David Stires was gone. A crowning joy had goldened his bitterness at the
last moment, and he had gone away with his son's face in his heart and
the smile of welcome on his lips.