Big Timber Part 20

"Nothing," she answered slowly. "I can't help the feeling. It's there.

But I can thrust it into the background, go on as if it didn't exist.

There's nothing else for me to do, that I can see. I'm sorry, Jack."

"So am I," he said grimly. "Still, it was a chance we took,--or I took, rather. I seem to have made a mistake or two, in my estimate of both you and myself. That is human enough, I suppose. You're making a bigger mistake than I did though, to let Monohan sweep you off your feet."

There was something that she read for contempt in his tone. It stung her.

"He hasn't swept me off my feet, as you put it," she cried. "Good Heavens, do you think I'm that spineless sort of creature? I've never forgotten I'm your wife. I've got a little self-respect left yet, if I was weak enough to grasp at the straw you threw me in the beginning. I was honest with you then. I'm trying to be honest with you now."

"I know, Stella," he said gently. "I'm not throwing mud. It's a d.a.m.nably unfortunate state of affairs, that's all. I foresaw something of the sort when we were married. You were candid enough about your att.i.tude.

But I told myself like a conceited fool that I could make your life so full that in a little while I'd be the only possible figure on your horizon. I've failed. I've known for some time that I was going to fail.

You're not the thin-blooded type of woman that is satisfied with pleasant surroundings and any sort of man. You're bound to run the gamut of all the emotions, sometime and somewhere. I loved you, and I thought in my conceit I could make myself the man, the one man who would mean everything to you."

"Just the same," he continued, "you've been a fool, and I don't see how you can avoid paying the penalty for folly."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"You haven't tried to play the game," he answered tensely. "For months you've been withdrawing into your sh.e.l.l. You've been clanking your chains and half-heartedly wishing for some mysterious power to strike them off. It wasn't a thing you undertook lightly. It isn't a thing--marriage, I mean--that you hold lightly. That being the case, you would have been wise to try making the best of it, instead of making the worst of it. But you let yourself drift into a state of mind where you--well, you see the result. I saw it coming. I didn't need to happen in this afternoon to know that there were undercurrents of feeling swirling about. And so the way you feel now is in itself a penalty. If you let Monohan cut any more figure in your thoughts, you'll pay bigger in the end."

"I can't help my thoughts, or I should say my feelings," she said wearily.

"You think you love him," Fyfe made low reply. "As a matter of fact, you love what you think he is. I daresay that he has sworn his affection by all that's good and great. But if you were convinced that he didn't really care, that his flowery protestations had a double end in view, would you still love him?"

"I don't know," she murmured. "But that's beside the point. I do love him. I know it's unwise. It's a feeling that has overwhelmed me in a way that I didn't believe possible, that I had hoped to avoid. But--but I can't pretend, Jack. I don't want you to misunderstand. I don't want this to make us both miserable. I don't want it to generate an atmosphere of suspicion and jealousy. We'd only be fighting about a shadow. I never cheated at anything in my life. You can trust me still, can't you?"

"Absolutely," Fyfe answered without hesitation.

"Then that's all there is to it," she replied, "unless--unless you're ready to give me up as a hopeless case, and let me go away and blunder along the best I can."

He shook his head.

"I haven't even considered that," he said. "Very likely it's unwise of me to say this,--it will probably antagonize you,--but I know Monohan better than you do. I'd go pretty far to keep you two apart--now--for your sake."

"It would be the same if it were any other man," she muttered. "I can understand that feeling in you. It's so--so typically masculine."

"No, you're wrong there, dead wrong," Fyfe frowned. "I'm not a self-sacrificing brute by any means. Still, knowing that you'll only live with me on sufferance, if you were honestly in love with a man that I felt was halfway decent, I'd put my feelings in my pocket and let you go. If you cared enough for him to break every tie, to face the embarra.s.sment of divorce, why, I'd figure you were ent.i.tled to your freedom and whatever happiness it might bring. But Monohan--h.e.l.l, I don't want to talk about him. I trust you, Stella. I'm banking on your own good sense. And along with that good, natural common sense, you've got so many illusions. About life in general, and about men. They seem to have centered about this one particular man. I can't open your eyes or put you on the right track. That's a job for yourself. All I can do is to sit back and wait."

His voice trailed off huskily.

Stella put a hand on his shoulder.

"Do you care so much as all that, Jack?" she whispered. "Even in spite of what you know?"

"For two years now," he answered, "you've been the biggest thing in my life. I don't change easy; I don't want to change. But I'm getting hopeless."

"I'm sorry, Jack," she said. "I can't begin to tell you how sorry I am.

I didn't love you to begin with--"

"And you've always resented that," he broke in. "You've hugged that ghost of a loveless marriage to your bosom and sighed for the real romance you'd missed. Well, maybe you did. But you haven't found it yet.

I'm very sure of that, although I doubt if I could convince you."

"Let me finish," she pleaded. "You knew I didn't love you--that I was worn out and desperate and clutching at the life line you threw. In spite of that,--well, if I fight down this love, or fascination, or infatuation, or whatever it is,--I'm not sure myself, except that it affects me strongly,--can't we be friends again?"

"Friends! Oh, h.e.l.l!" Fyfe exploded.

He came up out of his chair with a blaze in his eyes that startled her, caught her by the arm, and thrust her out the door.

"Friends? You and I?" He sank his voice to a harsh whisper. "My G.o.d--friends! Go to bed. Good night."

He pushed her into the hall, and the lock clicked between them. For one confused instant Stella stood poised, uncertain. Then she went into her bedroom and sat down, her keenest sensation one of sheer relief. Already in those brief hours emotion had well-nigh exhausted her. To be alone, to lie still and rest, to banish thought,--that was all she desired.

She lay on her bed inert, numbed, all but her mind, and that traversed section by section in swift, consecutive progress all the amazing turns of her life since she first came to Roaring Lake. There was neither method nor inquiry in this back-casting--merely a ceaseless, involuntary activity of the brain.

A little after midnight when all the house was hushed, she went into the adjoining room, cuddled Jack Junior into her arms, and took him to her own bed. With his chubby face nestled against her breast, she lay there fighting against that interminable, maddening buzzing in her brain. She prayed for sleep, her nervous fingers stroking the silky, baby hair.

CHAPTER XVII

IN WHICH THERE IS A FURTHER CLASH

One can only suffer so much. Poignant feeling brings its own anaesthetic. When Stella Fyfe fell into a troubled sleep that night, the storm of her emotions had beaten her sorely. Morning brought its physical reaction. She could see things clearly and calmly enough to perceive that her love for Monohan was fraught with factors that must be taken into account. All the world loves a lover, but her world did not love lovers who kicked over the conventional traces. She had made a niche for herself. There were ties she could not break lightly, and she was not thinking of herself alone when she considered that, but of her husband and Jack Junior, of Linda Abbey and Charlie Benton, of each and every individual whose life touched more or less directly upon her own.

She had known always what a woman should do in such case, what she had been taught a woman should do: grin, as Monohan had said, and take her medicine. For her there was no alternative. Fyfe had made that clear.

But her heart cried out in rebellion against the necessity. To her, trying to think logically, the most grievous phase of the doing was the fact that nothing could ever be the same again. She could go on. Oh, yes. She could dam up the wellspring of her impulses, walk steadfast along the accustomed ways. But those ways would not be the old ones.

There would always be the skeleton at the feast. She would know it was there, and Jack Fyfe would know, and she dreaded the fruits of that knowledge, the bitterness and smothered resentment it would breed. But it had to be. As she saw it, there was no choice.

She came down to breakfast calmly enough. It was nothing that could be altered by heroics, by tears and wailings. Not that she was much given to either. She had not whined when her brother made things so hard for her that any refuge seemed alluring by comparison. Curiously enough, she did not blame her brother now; neither did she blame Jack Fyfe.

She told herself that in first seeking the line of least resistance she had manifested weakness, that since her present problem was indirectly the outgrowth of that original weakness, she would be weak no more. So she tried to meet her husband as if nothing had happened, in which she succeeded outwardly very well indeed, since Fyfe himself chose to ignore any change in their mutual att.i.tude.

She busied herself about the house that forenoon, seeking deliberately a mult.i.tude of little tasks to occupy her hands and her mind.

But when lunch was over, she was at the end of her resources. Jack Junior settled in his crib for a nap. Fyfe went away to that area back of the camp where arose the crash of falling trees and the labored puffing of donkey engines. She could hear faint and far the voices of the falling gangs that cried: "Tim-ber-r-r-r." She could see on the bank, a little beyond the bunkhouse and cook-shack, the big roader spooling up the cable that brought string after string of logs down to the lake. Rain or sun, happiness or sorrow, the work went on. She found it in her heart to envy the st.u.r.dy loggers. They could forget their troubles in the strain of action. Keyed as she was to that high pitch, that sense of their unremitting activity, the ravaging of the forest which produced the resources for which she had sold herself irritated her. She was very bitter when she thought that.

She longed for some secluded place to sit and think, or try to stop thinking. And without fully realizing the direction she took, she walked down past the camp, crossed the skid-road, stepping lightly over main line and haul-back at the donkey engineer's warning, and went along the lake sh.o.r.e.

A path wound through the belt of brush and hardwood that fringed the lake. Not until she had followed this up on the neck of a little promontory south of the bay, did she remember with a shock that she was approaching the place where Monohan had begged her to meet him. She looked at her watch. Two-thirty. She sought the sh.o.r.e line for sight of a boat, wondering if he would come in spite of her refusal. But to her great relief she saw no sign of him. Probably he had thought better of it, had seen now as she had seen then that no good and an earnest chance of evil might come of such a clandestine meeting, had taken her stand as final.

She was glad, because she did not want to go back to the house. She did not want to make the effort of wandering away in the other direction to find that restful peace of woods and water. She moved up a little on the point until she found a mossy boulder and sat down on that, resting her chin in her palms, looking out over the placid surface of the lake with somber eyes.

And so Monohan surprised her. The knoll lay thick-carpeted with moss. He was within a few steps of her when a twig cracking underfoot apprised her of some one's approach. She rose, with an impulse to fly, to escape a meeting she had not desired. And as she rose, the breath stopped in her throat.

Twenty feet behind Monohan came Jack Fyfe with his hunter's stride, soundlessly over the moss, a rifle drooping in the crook of his arm. A sunbeam striking obliquely between two firs showed her his face plainly, the faint curl of his upper lip.

Something in her look arrested Monohan. He glanced around, twisted about, froze in his tracks, his back to her. Fyfe came up. Of the three he was the coolest, the most rigorously self-possessed. He glanced from Monohan to his wife, back to Monohan. After that his blue eyes never left the other man's face.