Hidden Creek Part 33

"Oh, d.a.m.n! Now you're mad with me and you won't listen to my plan!"

He was so childish in this outbreak that Sheila was moved to dim amus.e.m.e.nt. "I'm too beaten to be angry at anything," she said. "Just tell me your plan."

"No," he said sullenly. "I'll wait. I'm scared to tell you now!"

She did not urge him, and it was not till the next morning that he spoke about his plan. She had got out to her chair again and had made a pretense of eating an ill-cooked mess of canned stuff which he had brought to her on a tray. It was after he had taken this breakfast away that he broke out as though his excitement had forced a lock.

"I'm going down to Rusty to-day," he said. His eyes were s.h.i.+ning. He looked at her boldly enough now.

"And take me?" Sheila half-started up. "And take me?"

"No, ma'am. You're to stay here safe and snug." She dropped back. "I'll leave everything handy for you. There's enough food here for an army and enough fuel.... You're as safe here as though you were at the foot of G.o.d's throne. Don't look like that, girl. I can't take you. You're not strong enough to make the journey in this cold, even on a sled. And we can't"--his voice sunk and his eyes fell--"we can't go on like this, I reckon."

"N-no." Sheila's forehead was puckered. Her fingers trembled on the arms of her chair. "N-no...." Then, with a sort of quaver, she added, "Oh, why can't we go on like this?--till the snow goes and I can travel with you!"

"Because," he said roughly, "we can't. You take my word for it." After a pause he went on in his former decisive tone. "I'll be back in two or three days. I'll fetch the parson."

Sheila sat up straight.

His eyes held hers. "Yes, ma'am. The parson. I'm going to marry you, Sheila."

She repeated this like a lesson. "You are going to marry me...."

"Yes, ma'am. You'll have three days to think it over. If you don't want to marry me when the parson comes, why, you can just go back to Rusty with him." He laughed a little, came over to her, put a hand on each arm of her chair, and bent down. She shrank back before him. His eyes had the glitter of a hawk's, and his red and beautiful lips were soft and eager and--again--a little cruel.

"No," he said, "I won't kiss you till I come back--not even for good-bye.

Then you'll know how I feel about you. You'll know that I believe that you're a good girl and, Sheila"--here he seemed to melt and falter before her: he slipped down with one of his graceful Latin movements and hid his forehead on her knees--"Sheila, my _darling_--that I know you are fit--oh, so much more than fit--to be the mother of my children ..."

In half an hour, during which they were both profoundly silent, he came to her again. He was ready for his journey. She was sitting far back in her chair, her slim legs stretched out. She raised inscrutable eyes wide to his.

"Good-bye," he said softly. "It's hard to leave you. Good-bye."

She said good-bye even more softly with no change in her look. And he went out, looking at her over his shoulder till the last second. She heard the voice of his skis, hissing across the hard crust of the snow.

She sat there stiff and still till the great, wordless silence settled down again. Then she started up from her chair, ran across to the window, and saw that he was indeed gone. She came storming back and threw herself down upon the hide. She cried like a deserted child.

"Oh, Cosme, I'm afraid to be alone! I'm afraid! Why did I let you go?

Come back! Oh, please come back!"

It was late that night when Hilliard reached Rusty, traveling with all his young strength across the easy, polished surface of the world. He was dog-tired. He went first to the saloon. Then to the post-office. To his astonishment he found a letter. It was postmarked New York and he recognized the small, cramped hand of the family lawyer. He took the letter up to his bedroom in the Lander Hotel and sat on the bed, turning the square envelope about in his hands. At last, he opened it.

"MY DEAR COSME [the lawyer had written ... he had known Hilliard as a child], It is my strong hope that this letter will reach you promptly and safely at the address you sent me. Your grandfather's death, on the fifteenth instant, leaves you, as you are no doubt aware, heir to his fortune, reckoned at about thirty millions. If you will wire on receipt of this and follow wire in person as soon as convenient, it will greatly facilitate arrangements. It is extremely important that you should come at once. Every day makes things more complicated ... in the management of the estate. I remain, with congratulations,

"Sincerely your friend, ..."

The young man sat there, dazed.

He had always known about those millions; the expectation of them had always vaguely dazzled his imagination, tampered more than he was aware with the sincerity of his feelings, with the reality of his life; but now the shower of gold had fallen all about him and his fancy stretched its eyes to take in the immediate glitter.

Why, thought Hilliard, this turns life upside down ... I can begin to live ... I can go East. He saw that the world and its gifts were as truly his as though he were a fairy prince. A sort of confusion of highly colored pictures danced through his quick and ignorant brain. The blood pounded in his ears. He got up and prowled about the little room. It was oppressively small. He felt caged. The widest prairie would have given him scant elbow-room. He was planning his trip to the East when the thought of Sheila first struck him like a cold wave ... or rather it was as if the wave of his selfish excitement had crashed against the wave of his desire for her. All was foam and confusion in his spirit. He was quite incapable of self-sacrifice--a virtue in which his free life and his temperament had given him little training. It was simply a war of impulses. His instinct was to give up nothing--to keep hold of every gift. He wanted, as he had never in his life wanted anything before, to have his fling. He wanted his birthright of experience. He had cut himself off from all the gentle ways of his inheritance and lived like a very Ishmael through no fault of his own. Now, it seemed to him that before he settled down to the soberness of marriage, he must take one hasty, heady, compensating draft of life, of the sort of life he might have had. He would go East, go at once; he would fling himself into a tumultuous bath of pleasure, and then he would come back to Sheila and lay a great gift of gold at her feet. He thought over his plans, reconstructing them. He got pen and ink and wrote a letter to Sheila. He wrote badly--a schoolboy's inexpressive letter. But he told his story and his astounding news and drew a vivid enough picture of the havoc it had wrought in his simplicity. He used a lover's language, but his letter was as cold and lumpish as a golden ingot. And yet the writer was not cold.

He was throbbing and distraught, confused and overthrown, a boy of fourteen beside himself at the prospect of a holiday ... It was a stolen holiday, to be sure, a sort of truancy from manliness, but none the less intoxicating for that. Cosme's Latin nature was on top; Saxon loyalty and conscience overthrown. He was an egoist to his finger-tips that night. He did not sleep a wink, did not even try, but lay on his back across the bed, hands locked over his hair while "visions of sugar plums danced through his head." In the morning he went down and made his arrangements for Sheila, a little less complete, perhaps, than he had intended, for he met a worthy citizen of Rusty starting up the country with a sled to visit his traps and to him he gave the letter and confided his perplexities. It was a hasty interview, for the stage was about to start.

"My wife will sure take your girl and welcome; don't even have to ask her," the kind-eyed old fellow a.s.sured Hilliard. "We'll be glad to have her for a couple of months. She'll like the kids. It'll be home for her.

Yes, sir"--he patted the excited traveler on the shoulder--"you pile into the stage and don't you worry any. I'll be up at your place before night and bring the lady down on my sled. Yes, sir. Pile in and don't you worry any."

Cosme wrung his hand, avoided his clear eye, and climbed up beside the driver on the stage. He did not look after the trapper. He stared ahead beyond the horses to the high white hill against a low and heavy sky of clouds.

"There's a big snowstorm a comin' down," growled the driver. "Lucky if we make The Hill to-day. A reg'lar oldtimer it's agoin' to be. And cold--ugh!"

Cosme hardly heard this speech. The gray world was a golden ball for him to spin at his will. Midas had touched the snow. The sleigh started with a jerk and a jingle. In a moment it was running lightly with a crisp, cutting noise. Cosme's thoughts outran it, leaping toward their gaudy goal ... a journey out to life and a journey back to love--no wonder his golden eyes shone and his cheeks flushed.

"You look almighty glad to be going out of here," the driver made comment.

Hilliard laughed an explosive and excited laugh. "No almighty gladder than I shall be to be coming back again," he prophesied.

But to prophesy is a mistake. One should leave the future humbly on the knees of the G.o.ds. That night, when Hilliard was lying wakeful in his berth listening to the click of rails, the old trapper lay under the driving snow. But he was not wakeful. He slept with no visions of gold or love, a frozen and untroubled sleep. He had caught his foot in a trap, and the blizzard had found him there and had taken mercy on his pain.

They did not find his body until spring, and then Cosme's letter to Sheila lay wet and withered in his pocket.

CHAPTER XIII

LONELINESS

The first misery of loneliness takes the form of a restless inability to concentrate. It is as if the victim wanted to escape from himself. After Cosme's departure Sheila prowled about the silent cabin, began this bit of work and that, dropped it, found herself staring vaguely, listening, waiting, and nervously shook herself into activity again. She tried to whistle, but it seemed like somebody else's music and frightened her ears. At dusk she fastened sacking across the uncurtained windows, lighted both Cosme's lamps, bringing the second from her bedroom, and heaped up a dancing and jubilant fire upon the hearth. In the midst of this illumination she sat, very stiff and still, in the angular elk-hide-covered chair, and knitted her hands together on her knee. Her mind was now intensely active; memories, thoughts, plans, fancies racing fast and furious like screen pictures across her brain. And they seemed to describe themselves in loud whispers. She had difficulty in keeping these voices from taking possession of her tongue.

"I don't want to talk to myself," she murmured, and glanced over her shoulder.

A man has need of his fellows for a s.h.i.+eld. Man is man's shelter from all the storm of unanswered questions. Where am I? What am I? Why am I?--No reply. No rea.s.suring double to take away the ghost-sense of self, that unseen, intangible aura of personality in which each of us moves as in a cloud. In the souls of some there is an ever-present Man G.o.d who will forever save them from this supreme experience. Sheila's religion, vague, conventional, childish, faltered away from her soul. Except for her fire, which had a sort of sympathy of life and warmth and motion, she was unutterably alone. And she was beginning to suffer from the second misery of solitude--a sense of being many personalities instead of one.

She seemed to be entertaining a little crowd of confused and argumentative Sheilas. To silence them she fixed her mind on her immediate problem.

She tried to draw Hilliard close to her heart. She had an honest hunger for his warm and graceful beauty, for his young strength, but this natural hunger continually shocked her. She tried not to remember the smoothness of his neck as her half-conscious hands had slipped away from it that afternoon when he raised her from the snow. It seemed to her that her desire for him was centered somewhere in her body. Her mind remained cool, detached, critical, even hostile. She disliked the manner of his wooing--not that there should have been any insult to the pride of a nameless little adventurer, Hudson's barmaid, a waif, in being told that she was a "good girl" and fit to be the mother of this young man's children. But Sheila knew instinctively that these things could not be said, could not even be thought of by such a man as Marcus Arundel. She remembered his words about her mother.... Sheila wanted with a great longing to be loved like that, to be so spoken of, so exquisitely entreated. A phrase in Hudson's letter came to her mind, "I handled you in my heart like a flower" ... Unconsciously she pressed her hand against her lips, remembered the taste of whiskey and of blood. If only it had been d.i.c.kie's lips that had first touched her own. Blinding tears fell.

The memory of d.i.c.kie's comfort, of d.i.c.kie's tremulous restraint, had a strange poignancy.... Why was he so different from all the rest? So much more like her father? What was there in this pale little hotel clerk who drank too much that lifted him out and up into a sort of radiance? Her memory of d.i.c.kie was always white--the whiteness of that moonlight of their first, of that dawn of their last, meeting. He had had no chance in his short, unhappy, and restricted life--not half the chance that young Hilliard's life had given him--to learn such delicate appreciations, such tenderness, such reserves. Where had he got his delightful, gentle whimsicalities, that sweet, impersonal detachment that refused to yield to stupid angers and disgusts? He was like--in d.i.c.kie's own fas.h.i.+on she fumbled for a simile. But there was no word. She thought of a star, that morning star he had drawn her over to look at from the window of her sitting-room. Perhaps the artist in Sylvester had expressed itself in this son he so despised; perhaps d.i.c.kie was, after all, Hudson's great work ... All sorts of meanings and symbols pelted Sheila's brain as she sat there, exciting and fevering her nerves.

In three days Hilliard would be coming back. His warm youth would again fill the house, pour itself over her heart. After the silence, his voice would be terribly persuasive, after the loneliness, his eager, golden eyes would be terribly compelling! He was going to "fetch the parson" ... Sheila actually wrung her hands. Only three days for this decision and, without a decision, that awful, helpless wandering, those dangers, those rash confidences of hers. "O G.o.d, where are you? Why don't you help me now?" That was Sheila's prayer. It gave her little comfort, but she did fall asleep from the mental exhaustion to which it brought at least the relief of expression.

When she woke, she found the world a horrible confusion of storm. It could hardly be called morning--a heavy, flying darkness of drift, a wind filled with icy edges that stung the face and cut the eyes, a wind with the voice of a driven saw. The little cabin was caught in the whirling heart of a snow spout twenty feet high. The firs bent and groaned. There is a storm-fear, one of the inherited instinctive fears. Sheila's little face looked out of the whipped windows with a pinched and shrinking stare. She went from window to hearth, looking and listening, all day. A drift was blown in under the door and hardly melted for all the blazing fire. That night she couldn't go to bed. She wrapped herself in blankets and curled herself up in the chair, nodding and starting in the circle of the firelight.

For three terrible days the world was lost in snow. Before the end of that time Sheila was talking to herself and glad of the sound of her own hurried little voice. Then, like G.o.d, came a beautiful stillness and the sun. She opened the door on the fourth morning and saw, above the fresh, soft, ascending dazzle of the drift, a sky that laughed in azure, the green, snow-laden firs, a white and purple peak. She spread out her hands to feel the sun and found it warm. She held it like a friendly hand. She forced herself that day to shovel, to sweep, even to eat. Perhaps Cosme would be back before night. He and the parson would have waited for the storm to be over before they made their start. She believed in her own excuses for five uneasy days, and then she believed in the worst of all her fears. She had a hundred to choose from--Cosme's desertion, Cosme's death.... One day she spent walking to and fro with her nails driven into her palms.

Late that night the white world dipped into the still influence of a full white moon. Before Hilliard's cabin the great firs caught the light with a deepening flush of green, their shadows fell in even lavender tracery delicate and soft across the snow, across the drifted roof. The smoke from the half-buried chimney turned to a moving silver plume across the blue of the winter night sky--intense and warm as though it reflected an August lake.

The door of the cabin opened with a sharp thrust and Sheila stepped out. She walked quickly through the firs and stood on the edge of the open range-land, beyond and below which began the dark ridge of the primeval woods. She stood perfectly still and lifted her face to the sky. For all the blaze of the moon the greater stars danced in radiance. Their constellations sloped n.o.bly across her dazzled vision.