IN A FOREST OF ARDEN
Keen, morning sunlight, a sky clean as a hound's tooth, and an air cool
and tinctured with the wine of perfect autumn! Jessica breathed it
deeply as her buoyant step carried her along the mountain trails, brave
in the pageant of the passing year. Her face reflected the rich color
and her eyes were deep as the sky.
Only last night had been that sweet unfolding in which the past had been
swept away for ever. To-day her heart was almost too full to bear,
beating to thought of the man to whose arms the violin had called her.
That had been the hour of confidence, of love's sacrament, the closure
of all her distrust and agony. Now she longed inexpressibly for the
further assurance she knew would look from his eyes to hers; yet her joy
was so poignant that it was near to pain, and withal was so enwound with
maidenly consciousness that, knowing him near, she must have fled from
him. She walked rapidly on, losing herself in the windings of blind
wood-paths, revelling in the beauty of the silent, empty forest.
The morning had found the man whose image filled her mental horizon no
less a prey to conflicting emotions than herself. That hour on the
mountain-side, under the stars, had left Harry possessed of a melee of
perplexing emotions. Dreaming and waking, Jessica's face hung before his
eyes, her voice sounded in his ear. Yet over his happiness more than
once a chill had fallen, an odd shrinking, an unexplainable sense of
flush, of fastidiousness, of mortification. This subtle conflict of
feeling, not understood, had driven him, in sheer nervousness, to the
peaceful healing of the solitudes.
The future held no longer any doubt--it held only her. Where was that
future to be? Back in the city to which his painful curiosity had so
lately driven him? This lay no longer in his own choice; it was for her
to decide now, Jessica--his wife. He said the word softly, under his
breath, to the sweet secret grasses, as something mysterious and sacred.
How appealing, how womanly she was--how incommunicably dear, how--
He looked up transfixed, for she stood there before him, ankle-deep in a
brown whirlwind of leaves from a frost-stung oak, her hand to her cheek
in an adorable gesture that he knew, her lips parted and eager. She said
no word, nor did he, but he came swiftly and caught her to him, and her
face buried itself on his breast.
As he looked down at her thus folded, the trouble, the sense of vexing
complexity vanished, and the primitive demand reasserted its sway.
Presently he released her, and drew her gently to a seat on the
sprawling oak roots.
"I wanted so to find you," she said. "I have so many, many things to
say."
"It is all wonderfully strange and new!" he said. "It is as though I had
rubbed Aladdin's lamp, and suddenly had my heart's desire."
"Ah," she breathed, "am I that?"
"More than that, and yet once I--Jessica, Jessica! When I woke this
morning in the cabin down there, it seemed to me for a moment that only
last night was real, and all the past an ugly dream. How could you have
loved me? And how could I have thrown my pearl away?"
"We are not to think of that," she protested, "never, never any more."
"You are right," he rejoined cheerfully; "it is what is to come that we
must think of." He paused an instant, then he said:
"Last night, when you told me of the white house in the aspens, I did
not tell you that I had just come from there--from Aniston."
She made an exclamation of wonder. "Tell me," she said.
Sitting with her hand in his, he told of that night's experiences, the
fear that had held him as he gazed at her portrait in the library, the
secret of the Korean desk that had solaced his misery and sent him back
to the father he was not to see.
At mention of the will she threw out her hand with a passionate gesture.
"The money is not mine!" she cried. "It is yours! He intended to change
it--he told me so the day he died. Oh, if you think I--"
"No, no," he said gently. "There is no resentment, no false pride in my
love, Jessica. I am thinking of you--and of Aniston. You would have me
go back, would you not?"
She looked up smiling and slowly shook her head. "You are a blind
guesser," she said. "Don't you think I know what is in your mind? Not
Aniston, Hugh. Sometime, but not now--not yet. It is nearer than that!"
His eyes flowed into hers. "You understand! Yes, it is here. This is
where I must finish my fight first. Yesterday I would have left Smoky
Mountain for ever, because you were here. Now--"
"I will help you," she said. "All the world besides counts nothing if
only we are together! I could live in a cabin here on the mountain
always, in a Forest of Arden, till I grow old, and want nothing but
that--and you!" She paused, with a happy laugh, her eye turned away.
[Illustration]
A log cabin, but a home glorified by her presence! In a dozen words she
had sketched a sufficient Paradise. As he did not answer, she faced him
with crimsoning cheeks, then reading his look she suddenly threw her
arms about his neck.
"Hugh," she cried, "we belong to each other now. There is no one else to
consider, is there? I want to be to you what I haven't been--to bear
things with you, and help you."
He kissed her eyes and hair. "You _have_ helped, you _do_ help me,
Jessica!" he urged. "But I am jealous for your love. It must not be
offended. The town of Smoky Mountain must not sneer--and it would sneer
now."
"Let it!" she exclaimed resentfully. "As if I would care!"
"But _I_ would care," he said softly. "I want to climb a little higher
first."
She was silent a moment, her fingers twisting the fallen leaves. "You
don't want them to know that I am your wife?"
"Not yet--till I can see my way."
She nodded and smiled and the cloud lifted from her face. "You must know
best," she said. "This is what I shall do, then. I shall leave the
sanatorium to-morrow. The people there are nothing to me, but the town
of Smoky Mountain is yours, and I must be a part of it, too. I am going
to the Mountain Valley House. Mrs. Halloran will take care of me." She
sprang to her feet as she added: "I shall go to see her about it now."
He knew the dear desire her determination masked--to do her part in
softening prejudice, in clearing his way--and the thought of her
great-heartedness brought a mist to his eyes. He rose and walked with
her through the bracken to the road. They came out to the driveway just
below the trail that led to the Knob. The bank was high, and leaping
first he held up his arms to her and lifted her lightly down. In the
instant, as she lay in his arms, he bent and kissed her on the lips.
Neither noted two figures walking together that at that moment rounded
the bend of the road a little way above. They were Tom Felder and Doctor
Brent, the latter swinging a light suit-case, for he was on his way to
the station of the valley railroad. He had chosen to walk that he might
have a longer chat with his friend. Both men saw the kiss and
instinctively drew back, the lawyer with a sudden color on his face,
the doctor with a look of blank astonishment.
The latter, in one way, knew little about the town. Beside Felder and
Mrs. Halloran, whose surly husband he had once doctored when the town's
practitioner was away--thereby earning her admiration and
gratitude--there were few with whom he had more than a nodding
acquaintance. He had liked David Stires, and Jessica he genuinely
admired, though he had thought her at times somewhat distant. He himself
had introduced Felder to her, on one of the latter's visits. He had not
observed that the young lawyer's calls had grown more frequent, nor
guessed that he had more than once loitered on the mountain trails
hoping to meet her.
The doctor noted now the telltale flush on his companion's face.
"We have surprised a romance," he said, as the two unconscious figures
disappeared down the curving stretch. "Who is the man?"
"He is the one we have been talking about."
The other stared. "Not your local Jekyll and Hyde, the sneak who lost
his memory and found himself an honest man?"
Felder nodded. "His cabin is just below here, on the hillside."
"Good Lord!" ejaculated the doctor. "What an infernal pity! What's his
name?"
"Hugh Stires."
"Stires?" the other repeated. "Stires? How odd!" He stood a moment,
tapping his suit-case with his stick. Suddenly he took the lawyer's arm
and led him into the side-path.
"Come," he said, "I want to show you something."
He led the way quickly to the Knob, where he stopped, as much astonished
as his companion, for he had known nothing of the statue. They read the
words chiselled on its base. "The prodigal son," said Felder.
"Now look at the name on the headstone," said the physician.
Felder's glance lifted from the stone, to peer through the screening
bushes to the cabin on the shelf below, and returned to the other's face
with quick comprehension. "You think--"
"Who could doubt it? _I will arise and go unto my father._ The old man's
whim to be buried here had a meaning, after all. The statue is Miss
Holme's work--nobody in Smoky Mountain could do it--and I've seen her
modelling in clay at the sanatorium. What we saw just now is the key to
what might have been a pretty riddle if we had ever looked further than
our noses. It's a case of a clever rascal and damnable propinquity. The
ward has fallen in love with the black sheep!"
They betook themselves down the mountain in silence, the doctor
wondering how deep a hurt lay back of that instant's color on his
friend's now imperturbable face, and more than disturbed on Jessica's
account. Her care for the cross-grained, likable invalid had touched
him.
"A fine old man to own a worthless son," he said at length, musingly. "A
gentleman of the old school. Your amiable blackleg has education and
good blood in him, too!"
"I've wondered sometimes," said Felder, "if the old Hugh Stires, that
disreputable one that came here, wasn't the unreal one, and the Hugh
Stires the town is beginning to like, the real one, brought back by the
accident that took his memory. You medical men have cases of such double
identity, haven't you?"
"The books have," responded the other, "but they're like Kellner's
disease or Ludwig's Angina--nobody but the original discoverer ever sees
'em."
As they parted at the station the doctor said: "We needn't take the town
into our confidence, eh? Some one will stumble on the statue sooner or
later, but we won't help the thing along." He looked shrewdly in the
other's face as they shook hands.
"You know the old saying: There's as many good fish in the sea as ever
were caught."
The lawyer half laughed. "Don't worry," he said. "If I had been in
danger, the signal was hung out in plenty of time!"