The Key to Yesterday Part 10

"I couldn't sleep," she a.s.sured him. Then, she added serenely: "Do you suppose that the moon s.h.i.+nes like this every night, or that I can always expect times like these? You know," she taunted, "it was so hard to get you to admit that you cared that it was an achievement. I must be appreciative, mustn't I? You are an altogether reserved and cautious person."

He seized her in his arms with neither reserve nor caution.

"Listen," he said in an impa.s.sioned voice, "I have no right to touch you. In five minutes, you will probably not even let me speak to you.

I had no right to speak. I had no right to tell you that I loved you!"

She did not draw away. She only looked into his eyes very solemnly.

"You had no right?" she repeated, in a bewildered voice. "Don't you love me?"

"You don't have to ask that," he avowed. "You know it. Your own heart can answer such questions."

"Then," she decreed with womanlike philosophy, "you had a right to say so--because I love you, and that is settled."

"No," he expostulated, "I tell you I did not have the right. You must forget it. You must forget everything." He was talking with mad impetuosity.

"It is too late," she said simply. "Forget!" There was an indignant ring in her words. "Do you think that I could forget--or that, if I could, I would? Do you think it is a thing that happens every day?"

From a tree at the fence line came the softly lamenting note of a small owl, and across the fields floated the strident shriek of a lumbering night freight.

To Saxon's ears, the inconsequential sounds came with a painful distinctness. It was only his own voice that seemed to him m.u.f.fled in a confusion of roaring noises. His lips were so dry that he had to moisten them with his tongue.

To hesitate, to temporize, even to soften his recital, would mean another failure in the telling of it. He must plunge in after his old method of directness, even brutality, without preface or palliation.

Here, at all events, brutality were best. If his story appalled and repelled her, it would be the blow that would free her from the thraldom of the love he had unfairly stolen. If she turned from him with loathing, at least anger would hurt her less than heartbreak.

"Do you remember the story Ribero so graphically told of the filibuster and a.s.sa.s.sin and the firing squad in the plaza?" As he spoke, Saxon knew with a nauseating sense of certainty that his brain had never really doubted his ident.i.ty. He had futilely argued with himself, but it was only his eagerness of wish that had kept clamoring concerning the possibility of a favorable solution. All the while, his reason had convicted him. Now, as he spoke, he felt sure, as sure as though he could really remember, and he felt also his unworthiness to speak to her, as though it were not Saxon, but Carter, who held her in his arms. He suddenly stepped back and held her away at arms' length, as though he, Saxon, were s.n.a.t.c.hing her from the embrace of the other man, Carter. Then, he heard her murmuring:

"Yes, of course I remember."

"And did you notice his look of astonishment when I came? Did you catch the covert innuendoes as he talked--the fact that he talked at me--that he was accusing me--my G.o.d! recognizing me?"

The girl put up her hands, and brushed the hair back from her forehead. She shook her head as though to shake off some cloud of bewilderment and awaken herself from the shock of a nightmare. She stood so unsteadily that the man took her arm, and led her to the bench against the wall. There, she sank down with her face in her hands. It seemed a century, but, when she looked up again, her face, despite its pallor in the moonlight, was the face of one seeking excuses for one she loves, one trying to make the impossible jibe with fact.

"I suppose you did not catch the full significance of that narrative.

No one did except the two of us--the unmasker and the unmasked. Later, he studied a scar on my hand. It's too dark to see, but you can feel it."

He caught her fingers in his own. They were icy in his hot clasp, as he pressed them against his right palm.

"Tell me how it happened. Tell me that--that the sequel was a lie!"

She imperiously commanded, yet there was under the imperiousness a note of pleading.

"I can't," he answered. "He seemed to know the facts. I don't."

Her senses were unsteady, reeling things, and he in his evening clothes was an axis of black and white around which the moonlit world spun drunkenly.

Her voice was incredulous, far away.

"You don't know?" she repeated, slowly. "You don't know what you did?"

Then, for the first time, he remembered that he had not told her of the blind door between himself and the other years. He had presented himself only on a plea of guilty to the charge, without even the palliation of forgetfulness.

Slowly steeling himself for the ordeal, he went through his story. He told it as he had told Steele, but he added to it all that he had not told Steele--all of the certainty that was building itself against his future out of his past. He presented the case step by step as a prosecutor might have done, adding bit of testimony after bit of testimony, and ending with the sentence from the letter, which told him that he had gone West. He had played the coward long enough. Now, he did not even mention the hope he had tried to foster, that there might be a mistake. It was all so horribly certain that those hopes were ghosts, and he could no longer call them from their graves. The girl listened without a word or an interruption of any sort.

"And so," he said calmly at the end, "the possibility that I vaguely feared has come forward. The only thing that I know of my other life is a disgraceful thing--and ruin."

There was a long, torturing silence as she sat steadily, almost hypnotically, gazing into his eyes.

Then, a remarkable thing happened. The girl came to her feet with the old lithe grace that had for the moment forsaken her, leaving her a shape of slender distress. She rose buoyantly and laughed! With a quick step forward, she threw her arms around his neck, and stood looking into his drawn face.

He caught at her arms almost savagely.

"Don't!" he commanded, harshly. "Don't!"

"Why?" Her question was serene.

"Because it was Robert Saxon that you loved. You sha'n't touch Carter.

I can't let Carter touch you." He was holding her wrists tightly, and pressing her away from him.

"I have never touched Carter," she said, confidently. "They lied about it, dear. You were never Carter."

In the white light, her upturned eyes were sure with confidence.

"Now, you listen," she ordered. "You told me a case that your imagination has constructed from foundation to top. It is an ingenious case. Its circ.u.mstantial evidence is skilfully woven into conviction.

They have hanged men on that sort of evidence, but here there is a court of appeals. I know nothing about it. I have only my woman's heart, but my woman's heart knows you. There is no guilt in you--there never has been. You have tortured yourself because you look like a man whose name is Carter."

She said it all so positively, so much with the manner of a decree from the supreme bench, that, for a moment, the ghosts of hope began to rise and gather in the man's brain; for a moment, he forgot that this was not really the final word.

He had crucified himself in the recital to make it easier for her to abandon him. He had told one side only, and she had seen only the force of what he had left unsaid. If that could be possible, it might be possible she was right. With the reaction came a wild momentary joyousness. Then, his face grew grave again.

"I had sworn by every oath I knew," he told her, "that I would speak no word of love to you until I was no longer anonymous. I must go to Puerto Frio at once, and determine it."

Her arms tightened about his neck, and she stood there, her hair brus.h.i.+ng his face as though she would hold him away from everything past and future except her own heart.

"No! no!" she pa.s.sionately dissented. "Even if you were the man, which you are not, you are no more responsible for that dead life than for your acts in some other planet. You are mine now, and I am satisfied."

"But, if afterward," he went on doggedly, "if afterward I should awake into another personality--don't you see? Neither you nor I, dearest, can compromise with doubtful things. To us, life must be a thing clean beyond the possibility of blot."

She still shook her head in stubborn negation.

"You gave yourself to me," she said, "and I won't let you go. You won't wake up in another life. I won't let you--and, if you do--" she paused, then added with a smile on her lips that seemed to settle matters for all time--"that is a bridge we will cross when we come to it--and we will cross it together."

CHAPTER VIII

When he reached the cabin, Saxon found Steele still awake. The gray advance-light of dawn beyond the eastern ridges had grown rosy, and the rosiness had brightened into the blue of living day when an early teamster, pa.s.sing along the turnpike, saw two men garbed in what he would have called "full-dress suits," still sitting over their cigars on the verandah of the hill shack. A losing love either expels a man into the outer sourness of resentment, or graduates him into a friends.h.i.+p that needs no further testing. Steele was not the type that goes into an embittered exile. His face had become somewhat fixed as he listened, but there had been no surprise. He had known already, and, when the story was ended, he was an ally.