Over the Pass Part 41

Then silence. The truce of nonsense was dead. Persiflage was dead. Jack was as a mute stranger keeping at their side unasked, while the only glimpse he had of Mary was the edge of her hat and her fingertips on her father's sleeve. Silence, which he felt was as hard for them as for him, lasted until they were at the entrance to the quiet little hotel on a cross-town street where the Ewolds were staying; and having the first glimpse of Mary's eyes since they had started, he found nothing fathomable in them except unmistakable relief that the walk was over.

"Thank you for showing me the Velasquez," said the Doge.

"Thank you, Jack," Mary added.

Both spoke in a manner that signaled to him the end of all things, but an end which he could not accept.

"I--I--oh, there are a thousand questions I--" he broke out, desperately.

The muscles of his face tightened. Unconsciously he had leaned forward toward the Doge in his intensity, and his att.i.tude had become that of the Wingfield of the portrait. A lower note of command ran through the misery of his tone.

Jasper Ewold stared at him in a second of scrutiny, at once burningly a.n.a.lytic and reflective. Then he flushed as he had at sight of the figure in the drawing-room doorway. His look plainly said: "How much longer do you mean to hara.s.s me?" as if Jack's features were now no less the image of a hard and bitter memory than those of John Wingfield, Sr. Jack drew back hurt and dumb, in face of this anger turned on himself. At length, the Doge mustered his rallying smile, which was that of a man who carries into his declining years a burden of disappointments which he fears may, in his bad moments, get the better of his personal system of philosophy.

"Come, Mary!" he said, drawing his arm through hers. He became, in an evident effort, a grand, old-fashioned gentleman, making a bow of farewell. "Come, Mary, it's an early train and we have our packing yet to do."

This time it was, indeed, dismissal; such a dismissal with polite urgency as a venerable cabinet minister might give an importunate caller who is slow to go. He and Mary started into the hotel. But he halted in the doorway to say over his shoulder, with something of his old-time cheer, which had the same element of pity as his leave-taking on the trail outside of Little Rivers:

"Luck, Sir Chaps!"

"Luck!" Mary called in the same strained tone that she had called to Jack when he went over the pa.s.s on his way to New York, the tone that was like the click of a key in the lock of a gate.

x.x.x

WITH THE PHANTOMS

As Jack left the hotel entrance he was walking in the treadmill mechanics of a prisoner pacing a cell, without note of his surroundings, except of dim, moving figures with which he must avoid collision. The phantoms of his boyhood, bulky and stiflingly near, had a monstrous reality, yet the ghostly intangibility that mocked his sword-thrusts of tortured inquiry.

At length his distraction centered on the fact that he and his father were to dine alone that evening.

They dined alone regularly every Wednesday, when Jack made a report of his progress and received a lesson in business. It was at the last council of this kind that John Wingfield, Sr. had bidden his son to bring all questions and doubts to him. Now Jack hailed the weekly function as having all the promise of relief of a surgeon's knife. Fully and candidly he would unburden himself of every question beating in his brain and every doubt a.s.sailing his spirit.

By the time that he was mounting the steps of the house his growing impatience could no longer bear even the delay of waiting on dinner. When he entered the hall he was the driven creature of an impelling desire that must be satisfied immediately.

"Will you ask my father if he will see me at once?" he said to the butler.

"Mr. Wingfield left word that he had to go into the country for the night," answered the butler. "I am sorry, sir," he added confusedly, in view of the blank disappointment with which the information was received.

In dreary state Jack dined by himself in the big dining-room, leaving the food almost untouched. At intervals he was roused to a sense of his presence at table by the servant's question if he should bring another course. Without waiting for the last one, he went downstairs to the drawing-room, and standing near the "Portrait of a Lady," again poured out his questions, receiving the old answer of "I give! I give!" which meant, he knew, that she had given all of herself to him. Saying after saying of hers raced through his mind without throwing light on the mystery, which had the uncanniness of a conspiracy against him.

And after his mother, Mary had influenced him more than any other person.

She had brought life to the seeds which his mother had planted in his nature. That new life could not die, but without her it could not flourish. Her cry of "It's not in the blood!" again came echoing to his ears. What had she meant? The question sent him to the Ewolds' hotel; it sent this note up to her room:

"MARY:

"In behalf of old desert comradeship, if I were in trouble wouldn't you help me all you could? If I were in darkness and you could give me light, would you refuse? Won't you see me for a few moments, if I promise to keep to my side of the barrier which you have raised between us? I will wait here in the lobby a long time, hoping that you will.

"JACK."

"All the light I have to give. I also am in darkness," came the answer in a nervous, impulsive hand across a sheet of paper; and soon Mary herself appeared from the elevator, not in the fashion of the Avenue, but in simple gray coat and skirt, such as she wore at home. She greeted him in a startled, half-fearful manner, as if her presence were due to the impulsion of duty rather than choice.

"Shall we walk?" she asked, turning toward the door in the welcome of movement as a steadying influence in her evident emotion.

There they were in the old rhythm of step of Little Rivers companionship on a cross-town street. He saw that the costly hat that he had selected for her in the display of a shop-window after all was not the equal of the plain model with a fetching turn to the brim and a single militant feather, which she wore that evening. The light feather boa around her neck on account of the cool night air seemed particularly becoming. He was near, very near, her, so near that their elbows touched; but the nearness was like that of a picture out of a frame which has come to life and may step back into cold canvas at any moment. Oh, it was hard, in the might of his love for her, not to forget everything else and cry out another declaration, as he had from the canyon! But her face was very still. She was waiting for him to begin, while her fingers were playing nervously with the tip of her boa.

"I must be frank, very frank," he said.

"Yes, Jack, or why speak at all?"

"From the night of my arrival in Little Rivers, when the Doge at once recognized who I was without telling me, I saw that, under his politeness and his kindness, he was hostile to my presence in Little Rivers."

"Yes, I think that in a way he was," she answered.

"I was conscious that something out of the past was between him and me, and that it included you in a subtle influence that nothing could change.

And this afternoon, while you were at the house and my father came to the drawing-room door, I could not help noticing how the Doge was overcome.

You noticed it, too?"

"Yes, I never saw my father in such anger before. It seemed to me that he could have struck down that man in the doorway!" There was a perceptible shudder, but she did not look up, her glance remaining level with the flags.

"And on the pa.s.s you said, 'It's not in the blood!'" he continued. "Yes, almost in terror you said it, as if it spelled an impa.s.sable gulf between us. Why? why? Mary, haven't I a right to know?"

As he broke off pa.s.sionately with this appeal, which was as the focus of all the fears that had tormented him, they were immediately under the light of a street lamp. She turned her head toward him resolutely, in the mustering of her forces for an ordeal. Her face was pale, but there was an effort at the old smile of comradeship.

"Yes, as I said, the little light that I have is yours, Jack," she began.

"But there is not much. It is, perhaps, more what I feel than what I know that has influenced me. All that my father has ever said about you and your father and your relations to us was the night after I returned from the pa.s.s ahead of you, when you had descended into the canyon to frighten me with the risk you were taking."

"I did not mean to frighten you!" he interjected. "I only followed an impulse."

"Yes, one of your impulses, Jack," she remarked, comprehendingly. "Father and I have been so much together--indeed, we have never been apart--that there is more than filial sympathy of feeling between us. There is something akin to telepathy. We often divine each other's thoughts. I think that he understood what had taken place between us on the pa.s.s; that you had brought on some sort of a crisis in our relations. It was then that he told me who you were, as you know. Then he talked of you and your father--you still wish to hear?"

"Yes!"

"And you will listen in silence?"

"Yes!"

"I will grant your defence of your father, but you will not argue? I am giving what you ask, in justice to myself; I am giving my reasons, my feelings."

"No, I will not argue."

Their tones were so low that a pa.s.ser-by would have hardly been conscious that they were talking; but had the pa.s.ser-by caught the pitch he might have hazarded many guesses, every one serious.

"Then, I will try to make clear all that father said. You were the image of your father--a smile and a square chin. The smile could charm and the chin could kill. He liked you for some things that seemed to spring from another source, as he called it; but these would vanish and in the end you would be like your father, as he knew when he saw you break Pedro Nogales's arm. And you gloried in your strength; as you told me on the pa.s.s and as I saw for myself in the duel. And to you, father said, victory was the supreme guerdon of life. It ran triumphant and inextinguishable in your veins."

"I--" he said, chokingly; but remembered his promise not to argue.

"Any opposition, any refusal excited your will to overcome it in the sheer joy of the exercise of your strength. This had been your father's story in everything, even in his marriage."