Then I'll Come Back to You Part 40

Long before then she had learned how sensitive a thing was his spirit--and she wanted him to go on.

"It must be a terrible thing to--to know that one is lost." Her hands were buried deep in her pockets; she found it hard to keep pace with his stride. "I am always afraid of the night noises in the woods."

It was the girl in her which had spoken at which he smiled, but his smile was absent-minded.

"That is very strange, too," he accepted her lead, after contemplating it for a time. "It is always the one who can't trust his compa.s.s who loses his head, once he knows he's mixed up. Big Louie was that way.

He was lost once, for two days, before we found him; he was half mad with terror and pretty near dead with fatigue. He had been running in a big circle for hours, and we had to corner him before he would see that we were friends. He'd been listening to the night noises, you see; dwelling on the blackness and the silence and his lack of a fire, until his brain was no longer any use to him."

"What should one do?" she asked him faintly, when she knew that he was waiting for her to speak. Yet his answer persisted in adding to that word-image which his mind was molding.

"Quit letting yourself look back over your shoulder, to see if anything is following you!" He was suddenly gruff, and she knew that he was talking at himself. "Quit dwelling on the crackle in the brush, and the darkness, and the things you are afraid to fear. The wise man stops when he knows he's lost his bearings; he busies himself collecting wood for a fire, if not to keep the chill from his body by exercise, then because it keeps his mind off himself. And he sleeps if he can. Anyhow he lies quiet and rests. And when morning comes he uses his reason better for having rested, if his instincts still play him false. He has a look at the stars before daybreak; he watches the sun come up, and he holds a straight line by the height of land, or by the river flow, and he hits familiar country soon."

This time the girl did not interrupt him. She was watching his face.

"And that doesn't apply just to one little corner of the woods, or one little corner of life, either, does it?" he mused. "When a man's instinct fails him, he can stop and get his bearings back; when he's afraid he can kindle a fire within him, always, if he'll only rustle around before it gets too dark to search for fuel. But at that it isn't so very easy, in life, to get one's bearings straight again.

It's stormy, some nights, maybe, and the stars don't s.h.i.+ne; sometimes day dawns cloudy and the sun is not advertising its location too strongly. Instinct has always been strong in me, but there have been times, too, when I have had to hold my eyes mighty steady on some object far beyond me, to keep my line dead straight." He stopped short and faced her. "You would be afraid, yes," he told her, "but you would try hard to discipline yourself. You would never go rus.h.i.+ng blindly into a worse tangle, spending your strength and breaking your sanity down. Big Louie is a child; discipline is wasted on him. And--and I have always been able to find my way myself."

She knew now toward what point he had been talking. Mentally he had been wandering, as Big Louie once wandered in the flesh, in a wide circle that fetched up again against that doubt in himself which was hurting her, even while it was making her happy. He had taken the example of Big Louie and applied it to his own life, and suddenly the girl realized how infinitely greater was his philosophy thereof than was hers.

"I shall try to remember that," she answered soberly. "If ever I am lost I--I shall try to wait confidently for daylight, and keep my eyes to the fore."

She was near to tears when he stooped and knelt in the snow to tighten a thong slipping from one webbed foot. Below them stretched a plain of s.h.i.+mmering frost-points, bounded by inscrutable walls of black timber.

Somewhere within the warmer heart of a swamp a fox yapped hungrily; somewhere within her own heart his whimsical discourse had awakened a sense of the mystery of his wilderness--its friends.h.i.+p for those who love it--its implacable enmity for those who do not understand. And he looked up just when that emotion came flooding into her face.

"It is wonderful--wonderful--wonderful!" she breathed, throwing out both arms with that ecstatic impulsiveness which he knew so well. "Now I know why you said men always return to it, once they have felt its spell."

"You are lovelier than you know!" came back from him, almost gruffly again; and she could not parry with lightness so swift and strained a speech.

"You always tell me very pretty things," was all she could think of to say in reply.

But then, rising, he flung back his head and shook himself as if throwing off a burden too restraining and irksome. He laughed aloud, and from that minute until he loosed her feet from the snowshoes he was more like her "blue flannel and corduroy" lover again. But his attack no longer made her fear herself.

"If I cared for you, yes," he made her admit before he would let her go in that night. "If I cared for you, my engagement to no man could stand in the way. But that is the reason I know I do not care."

She had seen him grave with doubt that night; seen him fight to shake it off. There was doubt in his answer now.

"Because I am not----" But he could not force himself to ask it.

"Because I could never care as you would demand the woman should care who marries you."

She wanted to help him a little, she didn't know just why. Pity is a very dangerous emotion, when pity is not sought.

"You are loving me that way this minute," he said, but his words were dogged. "Loving me more than you know."

There was neither reference to her letter nor mention of that night at Thirty-Mile when she had stolen out to bid him good-bye. Other long tramps followed, on other pale and zero nights, but his att.i.tude remained much the same. Whimsically at times he shared his innermost thoughts with her; always he told her that he cared, with a gentleness in the telling that made it hard for her to listen. Barbara least of all realized what those days were doing to her, but before that week had run its course even Caleb's eyes were opened to the change in Steve.

"I told you so," he said, but he took no delight in recommending it to his sister's attention. "If he didn't know it before, she's taught him this trip that he hasn't a chance."

"Your sensation is ancient history, Cal," was all she would reply.

And even though, so far as Steve's peace of mind was concerned, Miss Sarah's scheming had not helped at all, that tiny lady still chose to view her activities complacently the day Barbara took leave of her again.

"Write me every detail of your plans," Miss Sarah ordered her. "Proxy bridal preparations are better than none, my dear, and I am madly interested."

At the last minute Barbara bobbed her dark head in reply.

"I will," she promised meekly. And then, wide eyes vague with fear: "Aunt Sarah, I--I'm not sure that I want to be--married at all!"

"You will be coming back," he told her again the day he put her on the train. "You will be back in the spring?"

It was his old, hopeful challenge, with all the hope left out.

"I think so," she faltered in return. "I mean to come and see the completion of your work, if father will let me." She knew a moment of confusion. "I wonder, many nights, if you are safe, up here in the hills."

Indeed, Miss Sarah had made progress, though the surface indications were small. The girl would never think of him again simply in terms of blue flannel and corduroy. But that was not the most disturbingly vivid memory which she carried away with her.

"I love you," he framed the words silently as the train was pulling out, and although their positions were reversed, the moment was so reminiscent of that day when he had leaned out of her father's switch engine cab and asked if she wanted a ride, that it made her throat ache.

She waved a small gloved hand to him on the platform.

She did not want to go.

CHAPTER XXI

SETTING THE STAGE

There are two interviews which should be mentioned here, if for no other reason then merely because they were both so entirely the outcome of Miss Sarah's Christmas party. Neither of them were long; the last one which took place between Wickersham and the girl he was to marry was the briefer of the two. But her prettily serious argument that the first of May was too early a date for their wedding, in view of the work which he had to do and her own state of unpreparedness, left him so white of face that she felt guiltily sorry for him for many days to follow--felt guiltier still at the relief she experienced when she had established that reprieve. The other interview was longer, and took place days earlier, but it was no more of a delight to Archibald Wickersham.

Dexter Allison had returned home almost a week in advance of his daughter, pleading stress of business, but in spite of the demands upon his time and attention, he had found it impossible to forget the night of the dinner, when he had watched his daughter's eyes upon Stephen O'Mara's face.

Allison had never professed a knowledge of women. Like her mother, Barbara had been many, many times an enigma which he who had often taken men's souls apart had not dared even to try to solve. Partly because of that, partly because his observation in other quarters had taught him the dangerous futility of it, he had lifted his voice neither in encouragement nor protest of Archibald Wickersham. The two had grown up from childhood together--Barbara and the man whom she was engaged to marry--and more than once her father had a.s.sured himself that at least there was a long knowledge of each other's shortcomings to make for safety in the long run.

His own dislike for Wickersham he had never allowed to sway his middle course of non-interference. And he had never liked the boy; never learned to like the man he had grown to be. Underneath Dexter Allison's jovial exterior there was a cynicism which for hardness would have made Garry Devereau's worst moments seem mere childish fits of spleen. Men do not watch other men whimper and beg for mercy--little rascals who have been nipped in a greater schemer's trap--without beginning to wonder, soon or late, how much of man is warped and twisted; and he had been watching Archie Wickersham now for months. He believed that men's men were not women's men, the oft-repeated epigram to the contrary. He had eaten too many dinners at which the lion of the evening who sat on the charming hostess's right hand, was a man of rank and a thing of ranker repute. But after his first shock at the realization that his baby was a woman grown, he had promised himself that her engagement and Wickersham's should be a long one; promised that the man into whose keeping she was given should have earned the t.i.tle in full.

Wickersham's code, in many respects, was above reproach. Allison had taken pains to ascertain that. But beyond that he did not let himself go; he neither allowed himself to wonder at, nor regret, her choice.

He was too honest to decry in another much which he knew would not measure up to Golden Rule standards in himself. And he had a really great man's unshakable faith in his own flesh and blood.

Yet he had been troubled more than a little since his Christmas trip to Morrison. When he turned a page he turned it for all time, but in the last day or two he had caught himself surrepticiously trying to steal a glance at some which had only just rustled into place. Dexter Allison had left brilliant men of cross-examination panting impotently at the barrenness of their efforts; he had known it and enjoyed it to the full. But he knew, too, that he could never face, jauntily or otherwise, one reproach in the dusky eyes of the girl with whom he had more than once played truant, to breakfast with Caleb and Miss Sarah.

And he was facing that thought, nearer to panic than he had ever been before, the night before New Year's, when Wickersham was announced at nine. He was thinking of Barbara's mother when he beckoned his guest to a chair, shook his head over his red cheeks, and offered a cigar.

"Devilish cold weather," he grunted, none too graciously, for he had not wanted to be disturbed just then.

The younger man admitted that it was. His mind, plainly, was not upon the weather, but he found difficulty in introducing a topic of his own choosing. Outspokenness had never been one of Archie Wickersham's boldest characteristics, so Allison a.s.sisted him now. Allison liked a man to be outspoken.