The Snowshoe Trail Part 17

The man stood with arms limp at his side, and a great surge of mingled emotions swept the girl as in a flood. She was pale as a ghost, and her hands trembled when she stretched them out. "Harold," she murmured unsteadily. She tried to smile. "Is it really you, Harold?"

"It's I," he answered. "We've come together--at last."

The words seemed to rally her scattered faculties. The dreamlike quality of the scene at once dissolved. Utter and bewildering surprise is never an emotion that can long endure; its very quality makes for brevity. Already some leveling, cool sense within her had begun to accept the fact of his presence.

Instinctively her eyes swept his face and form. All doubt was past: this man was unquestionably Harold. Yet she was secretly and vaguely shocked. Her first impression was one of change: that the years had some way altered him,--other than the natural changes that no living creature may escape.

In reality his face had aged but little. He had worn just such a mustache when he went away. Perhaps his eyes were changed: for the moment she thought that they were, and the change repelled her and estranged her. His mouth was not quite right, either; his form, though powerful, had lost some of its youthful trimness.

It seemed to her, for one fleeting instant, that there was a brutality in his expression that she had never seen before. But at once the reaction came. Of course these northern forests had changed him. He had fought with the cold and the snow, with all the primeval forces of nature: he had simply hardened and matured. It was true that the calm strength of Bill's face was not to be seen in his. Nevertheless he was clean, stalwart, and his embarra.s.sment was a credit to him rather than a discredit.

This thought was the beginning of the reaction that in a moment grasped her and held her. The truth suddenly flamed clear and bright: that Harold Lounsbury had returned to her arms. Her search was over. She had won. He stood before her, alive and well. He had come back to her.

Her effort had been crowned with success.

He was her old lover, in the flesh. Of course she would experience some shock on first meeting him, see some changes; but they were nothing that should keep her from him. He seized her hands in both of his.

"Virginia," he cried. "My G.o.d, I can't believe it's you!"

She remained singularly cool in the ardor of this cry. "Why didn't you write?" she asked. "Why didn't you come home?"

The questions, instead of embarra.s.sing him further, put Harold at his ease. He was on safe grounds now. He had prepared for just these queries, on the long walk to the cabin.

"I did write," he cried. "Why didn't you answer?"

The words came glib to his lips. She stared at him in amazement. "You did--you say you wrote to me?" she asked him, deeply moved.

"Wrote? I wrote a dozen times. And I never received a word--except from Jules Nathan."

"But Jules Nathan--Jules Nathan is dead!"

"He is?" But Harold's surprise was feigned. This was one piece of news that had trickled through the wastes to him,--of the death of Jules Nathan, a man known to them both. It was safe to have heard from him. The contents of the letter could never be verified. "He told me--after I'd written many times, and never got an answer--that you were engaged to be married--to a Chicago man. I thought you'd forgotten me. I thought you'd been untrue."

Virginia held hard on her faculties and balanced his words. She had known Chicago men during the six years that she had moved in the most exalted social circles of her own city. The story held water, even if she had been inclined to doubt it. She knew it was always easy for an engagement rumor to start and be carried far, when a prominent girl was involved. "I didn't get your letters," she told him. "Are you sure you addressed them right----"

"I thought so----"

"And you didn't get mine----"

"No--not after the first few days. I changed my address--but I told you of the change in a letter. I never heard from you after that."

"Then it's all been a misunderstanding--a cruel mistake. And you thought I had forgotten----"

"I thought you'd married some one else. I couldn't believe it when Bill came to my cabin to-day and told me you were here--I've been trapping over toward the Yuga. And now--we're together at last."

But curiously these last words cost her her self-possession. Instantly she was ill at ease. The reestablishment of their old relation could only come gradually: although she had not antic.i.p.ated it, the six years of separation had wrought their changes. She felt that she needed time to become adjusted to him--just as a man who has been blind needs time to become adjusted to his vision. And at once their proximity, in this lonely cabin, was oddly embarra.s.sing.

"Where's Bill?" she asked. She turned to the door and called. "Bill, where are you?"

His voice seemed quite his own when he answered from the stillness of the night. "I'll be in in a moment--I was just getting a load of wood."

It wasn't true. He had been standing dumb and inert in the darkness, his thoughts wandering afar. But he began hastily to fill his arms with fuel. Virginia turned back to her new-found lover.

She was a little frightened by the expression on his face. His eyes were glowing, the color had risen in his cheeks, he was curiously eager and breathless. "Before he comes," he urged. "We've been apart so long----"

His hands reached out and seized hers. He drew her toward him. She didn't resist: she felt a deep self-annoyance that she didn't crave his kiss. She fought away her unwonted fear; perhaps when his lips met hers everything would be the same again, and her long-awaited happiness would be complete. He crushed her to him, and his kiss was greedy.

Yet it was cold upon her lips. She struggled from his arms, and he looked at her in startled amazement. In fact, she was amazed at herself. When she had time to think it over, alone in her bed at night, she decided that her desperate struggle had been merely an attempt to free herself from his arms before Bill came in and saw them. She only knew that she didn't want this comrade of hers, this stalwart forester, to see her in Harold's embrace. But in the second of the act she had known a blind fear, almost a repulsion, and an overwhelming desire to escape.

She turned with a radiant smile to welcome the tall form that strode in, looking neither to the right nor left, arms heaped with wood. She found, much to her surprise, that she felt more at ease after Bill came in. She asked him how he had happened to get trace of the missing man; he answered in an even, almost expressionless tone that someway puzzled her. Then she launched desperately into that old life-saver in moments of embarra.s.sment,--a discussion of the fates and fortunes of mutual acquaintances.

"But I'm tired, Harold," she told him in an hour. "The surprise of seeing you has been--well, too much for me. I believe I'll go to my room. It's behind that curtain."

Harold rose eagerly as if something was due him in the moment of parting; Bill got up in respect to her. But her glance was impartial.

A moment later she was gone.

The first night Bill and Harold made bunks on the floor of the cabin, but health and propriety decreed that such an arrangement could only be temporary. They could not put their trust in an immediate deliverance.

They might be imprisoned for weeks to come. And Bill solved the problem with a single suggestion.

They would build a small cabin for the two men to sleep in. Many times he had erected such a structure by his own efforts; the two of them could push it up in a few hours' work.

Harold had no fondness for toil of this kind, but he couldn't see how he could well avoid it. His indifference to his own fate was quite past by now. The single moment before Bill had entered the cabin door had thoroughly wakened his keenest interests and desires; already, he thought, he had entirely re-established his relations with Virginia. He was as anxious to make good now as she was to have him. Already he thought himself once more a man and a gentleman of the great outside world. His vanity was heightened; the girl's beauty had increased, if anything, since his departure; and he was more than ready to go through the adventure to its end. And he didn't dare run the risk of displeasing Virginia so soon after their meeting.

He knew how she stood on the matter. He had ventured to make one protest,--and one had been quite enough. "I'm really not much good at cabin building," he had said. "But I don't see why Bill shouldn't go work at it. I suppose you hired him for all camp work."

For an instant Virginia had stared at him in utter wonder, and then a swift look of grave displeasure had come into her face. "You forget, Harold, that it was Bill that brought you back. The thirty days he was hired for were gone long ago." But she had softened at once. "It's your duty to help him, and I'll help him too, if I can."

They had cut short logs, cleaned away the snow, and with the strength of their shoulders lifted the logs one upon another. With his ax Bill cunningly cut the saddles, carving them down so that the rainfall would drain down the corners rather than lie in the cavities and thus rot the timbers. Planks were cut for the roof, and tree boughs laid down for the floor.

The floor s.p.a.ce was only seven feet long by eight wide--just enough for two bunks--and the walls were about as high as a sleeping-car berth. The work was done at the day's end.

In the next few days Bill mostly left the two together, trying to find his consolation in the wild life of the forest world outside the cabin.

Harold had taken advantage of his absence and had made good progress: Virginia's period of readjustment was almost complete. She was prepared to make the joys of the future atone for the sorrows of the past.

Harold was still good-looking, she thought; his speech, though breaking careless at times, was attractive and charming; and most of all his love-making was more arduous than ever. In the city life that they planned he would fit in well; his uncle would help him to get on his feet. Fortunately for their peace of mind, they did not know the real truth,--that Kenly Lounsbury himself was at that moment struggling with financial problems that were about to overwhelm him. She told herself, again and again, that her life would be all that she had dreamed, that her fondest hopes had come true. A few weeks more of the snow and the waste places,--and then they could start life anew.

Yet there was something vaguely sinister, something amiss in the fact that she found herself repeating the thought so many times. It was almost as if she were trying to rea.s.sure herself, to drown out some whispering inner voice of doubt and fear. She couldn't get away from a haunting feeling that, in an indescribable way, her relations with Harold had changed.

His ardent speeches didn't seem to waken sufficient response in her own breast. She lacked the ecstasy, the wonder that she had known when, as a girl, she had first become engaged to Harold. They embarra.s.sed her rather than thrilled her; they didn't seem quite real. Perhaps she had simply grown older. That was it: some of her girlish romance had died a natural death. She would give his man her love, would take his in return, and they would have the usual, normal happiness of marriage.

All would come out well, once they got away from the silence and the snows.

Perhaps his large and extravagant speeches were merely out of place in the stark reality of the wilderness; they could thrill her as ever when she returned to her native city. Likely he could dance, after a little practice, as well as ever; fill his niche in society and give her all the happiness that woman has a right to expect upon this imperfect earth. There was certainly nothing to be distressed over now. They had been brought together as if by a miracle; any haunting doubt and fear, too subtle and intangible to put into words or even concrete thought, would quickly pa.s.s away.

She did not, however, go frequently into his arms. Someway, an embarra.s.sment, a sense of inappropriateness and unrest always a.s.sailed her when he tried to claim the caresses that he felt were his due. And at first she could not find a plausible explanation for her reserve.

Perhaps these tendernesses were also out of place in the grim reality of the North; more likely, she decided, it was a subtle sense, the guardian angel of her own integrity, warning her that too intimate relations with that man must be avoided, isolated and exiled as they were. "Not now, Harold," she would tell him. "Not until we're established again--at home."

Finally his habits and his actions did not quite meet with her approval.

The first of these was only a little thing,--a failure to keep shaved.

Shaving in these surroundings, without a mirror, with a battered old razor that had lain long in the cabin and had to be sharpened on a whetstone, where every drop of hot water used had to be laboriously heated on the stove, was an annoying ch.o.r.e at best: besides, there was no one to see him except Virginia and the guide. The stubble matted and grew on his lips and jowls. Bill, in contrast, shaved with greatest care every evening. A more important point was that his avoidance of his proper share of Bill's daily toil. He neither hewed wood nor drew water, nor made any apologies for the omission. Rather he gave the idea that Bill's services were due him by rights.