The Tempering Part 51

He leaned forward toward her with an avid eagerness in his eyes, and abruptly his voice shook as he stubbornly repeated his question:

"I was asking you why--so far as I'm concerned--you care?"

The curt interrogation, with the throb of the restraint in the voice that put it, brought to Anne that same feeling of exaltation that had come when he had seized her so vehemently in his arms in the bluegra.s.s garden on a June morning. Even now she could sway him if only she let a touch of the responsiveness that clamoured in her find expression, but she had come in answer to a more austere summons. Between them as lovers who had irreparably quarrelled matters stood unchanged, and she was not here to fight emotion with emotion. She had come to draw him back, if she could, from the edge of disaster. Incidentally--for to her just then it seemed quite incidental--she was engaged to marry Morgan Wallifarro.

"I care," she said, rather weakly and conscious of the ring of plat.i.tude in her words, "because of the past--because we are--old friends."

Boone's face darkened again into clouded disappointment; then he looked down, jerking his head toward the cot, and demanded shortly:

"All right. I was a fool, of course, but how about him?"

"Will he sleep easier because you prove a deserter to the cause to which you swore allegiance?" There was a touch of scorn in her voice now.

"Does his rest depend on your punis.h.i.+ng one murder with another?"

"We're talking two languages," he retorted, and the upflaring of his lover's hope had left him, in its quenching, inflexible. "Our standards are as far apart as the Koran and the Bible."

"Neither of them exalts the coward," came her swift response. "Any agitator could lash the Gregories into mob-violence tonight. Only one man might have the courage--and the strength--to hold them in leash."

Boone set down the heavy box and came out into the room where the fire burned. He seemed, in his white-hot anger, too distrustful of himself for speech, and, perhaps because he loved her so unconquerably and despairingly, his fury against her was the greater.

"Before Almighty G.o.d," he declared, in a voice low and quaking with pa.s.sion, "I think I can understand how some men kill the women they love! Call me a barbarian if you like. I am one. Call me a renegade from your self-complacent culture. I welcome the impeachment, but don't call me a coward, because that's a lie."

He broke off; then burst out again in a mounting voice:

"Until a little while ago I might have yielded to everything you asked, because the fear of offending you was a mightier thing to me than everything else combined. But that was the infirmity of a man weakened by love--not strengthened. I've regained my strength now, and I mean to keep it. Hate is a stronger G.o.d than love!"

Remaining stiff-postured on the hearth, Boone rained upon her the wrath that c.u.mulative incitements had kindled and fed to something like mania, and she met it with challenge for challenge and with eyes whose fires were clearer than those of his own.

"You say you've regained your strength. Is that why you're afraid to listen to me? Is that why you don't dare undergo my test?"

"Afraid to listen?" In spite of his fury he put his question with a courteous gravity that was disconcerting. "Haven't I been listening? Am I not still listening?"

But Anne was not to be deflected, and her clear-noted voice still rang with the authority of conviction:

"You talk of holding your hand until you had 'retreated to the ditch or wall,' or whatever your legal phrase was, yet you know that you don't dare give your anger time to cool. You don't dare hold these men, who are crying out for blood, quiet for twenty-four hours and spend that time alone with your own conscience."

"And yet," he ventured to remind her, "I left Frankfort last night.

Before I started I reached my decision. There have been already more than twenty-four hours, but they haven't cooled me except to make my certainty greater."

"This boy whose face you just showed me brought word to Frankfort that Saul Fulton was back to have you murdered," went on the girl with unshaken steadiness. "The old instinct for vengeance swept you into pa.s.sion, but you didn't surrender to it then. You went to the prosecutor. Why?"

"I've already told you. I tried the law first."

"Because yesterday you realized that this lawless way was the wrong way.

Your rebuff there maddened you still more. You came back, and when you got here you were in doubt again. Isn't that true?"

"Not for long," he replied shortly.

"Yet you _were_ in doubt. Then you listened to the hot heads, and the fever rose again in your veins. Tonight this boy was killed. One after the other these things happened to work you up to a sort of frenzy and keep you there. I've heard you tell how murder lords here used to hire a.s.sa.s.sins and how they had to keep them keyed up with whiskey till the work was done. Don't you see that you've been drinking a more dangerous whiskey, and that you don't dare to let this vengeance wait, because you know if you did, you couldn't face your own self-contempt?"

At first there had been despair in her heart because the face of the man she thought she knew had been the face of a stranger, as unamenable to change as that of the sphinx. But now she knew that if she could only make him see in time what she had seen, she might succeed. He was a sleep-walker, and to the sleep-walker only the dream is real--yet he had only to be waked to step again into sanity. The steel had been too gradually forged, tempered and tested to become pig iron again in a breath, simply because it dreamed itself pig iron.

"You talk of your strength, and I call on you to test it. I call on you to do not what any persuasive agitator could do, but what only you can do--to keep the wild-beast impulses in your own men caged for one more day--and to spend that day with your own conscience."

"You ask me first to forget that you are anything more to me than an old friend. Then you ask me to obey your whim in doing what is next to impossible," he summarized in a coldly ironical voice. "You are setting me very easy tasks tonight!"

"Any one can do the easy things." The contempt in her clear tone was not for him. It was not accusing, but it seemed to wither the men of lesser strength and subtly to pay him tribute by its indirection, and then abruptly she played her strongest card: "Victor McCalloway, your teacher, didn't school you to seek the easy way."

Once more the anger darted in his eyes, but he flinched at the name as though under a lash.

"Why need we bring Mr. McCalloway into this discussion?" he indignantly demanded. "Perhaps I understand him better than you. Mr. McCalloway is no apostle of tame submission."

Anne caught the tempestuous note of protest, and she caught, as well, the meaning that actuated it; Boone's self-denied unwillingness to confront the accusing thought of his hero. That name she had studiously refrained from mentioning until now.

"And yet you know that what I am saying might come from his own lips.

You know that if he were here and you left this house tonight to lead a mob of incendiaries and gunmen over the ridge you couldn't go with his blessing or his handshake. You know that you'd have to leave behind you a man whose respect you'd forfeited and whose heart you'd broken."

She stopped, and the voice that came to her was strained as it questioned: "Is that all you've got to say?"

Anne shook her head. "No," she told him, "there's one thing more--a request. Please don't answer me for five minutes."

Boone Wellver jerked his head with a gesture that might have been either acquiescence or refusal. But from his pocket he drew a watch and stood holding it in his hand. The tight-drawn muscles of his face made it a painful thing to watch, and after a little while he turned from her and she could see only his back--with shoulders that twitched a little from time to time under the spasmodic a.s.sault of some torturing thought. She was glad that she could not see his eyes. Had there been any place of retreat, save that room where death lay, she would have fled, because when a man stands in his place of Gethsemane he should be alone.

But before Boone's mental vision, a vision from which a b.l.o.o.d.y and darkening veil seemed to be drawing slowly aside, were pa.s.sing pictures out of his memory. He saw grave eyes, clouded with the embarra.s.sment of talking self, as the tall figure of Victor McCalloway stood in the woods admitting that he had refused a commission in China, because a mountain boy might need him in his fight against an inherited wormwood of bitterness. He saw himself now an apostate to a faith he had embraced; a doctrine he had both learned and taught. Boone Wellver was waking out of an ugly trance, but he was not waking without struggle, not without counter waves that threatened to engulf him again, not without the sweat of agony.

The crystal into which he gazed cleared and clouded; clouded and cleared. He could not yet be sure of himself. While he stood with that stress upon him still in molten indecision, he was not quite sure whether he heard the girl's voice, or whether it came to him from memory of other days, as it had sounded under dogwood blossoming on the crest of Slag-face:

"Comes now to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, Cold, edged with dear bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers!"

It was, however, a real voice though a faint one, that came next to his ears.

"You said these wild sheep were your people--that you owed them what you could give them--of leaders.h.i.+p."

Boone wheeled, and his voice broke from him like a sob, as the watch slipped from his fingers and fell, shattered.

"Do you mean to go through with it--you and Morgan?"

But before she could shape a response, his hand came up and he went on in excited haste: "No, don't answer. You didn't come to answer questions." Then, with a long intake of breath and an abrupt change to flint hardness again, he added: "It was I who was to answer you. You are right. I was a d.a.m.ned quitter. These _are_ my people, and I belong to them--but not to the feud-war, to myself--nor to you."

"Boone," began Anne Masters, but she got no further than that, for the man again raised a warning hand and spoke in a crisp whisper:

"Hus.h.!.+" he commanded, and bent, listening.

In the distance a long whoop was dying away, and then after a moment of tense silence a cautious whistle sounded from the night outside. Boone took a step toward the door, and halted.

"They're coming! It won't do for you to be found here with me alone." He cast a hurried glance toward the other room, then added; "No--_he's_ in there. They'll have to see him. Can you wait upstairs?"

Anne Masters nodded, and as, with a lamp which he handed her, she put her foot upon the lowest step of the boxed-in stairway, he went on: