Satan Sanderson Part 35

A pale-faced, breathless man in clerical dress pushed forward through the press, as the figure stopped ... thrust out his hands blindly.

"Not--guilty, your Honor!" he said.

A cry came from the prisoner at the bar. He leaped toward him as he fell and caught him in his arms.

CHAPTER XLIX

THE CRIMSON DISK

The group in the judge's room was hushed in awestruck silence. The door was shut, but through the panels, from the court-room, came the murmur of many wondering voices. By the sofa on which lay the man who had made expiation stood the bishop and Harry Sanderson. Jessica knelt beside it, and the judge and those who stood with him in the background knew that the curtain was falling upon a strange and tangled drama of life and death.

After the one long, sobbing cry of realization, throughout the excitement and confusion, Jessica had been strangely calm. She read the swift certainty in Doctor Brent's face, and she felt a painful thankfulness. The last appeal would not be to man's justice, but to G.o.d's mercy! The memories of the old blind days and the knowledge that this man--not the one to whom she had given her love at Smoky Mountain, at whom she dared not look--had then been her lover, rolled about her in a stinging mist. But as she knelt by the sofa the hand that chafed the nerveless one was firm, and she wiped the cold lips deftly and tenderly.

Hugh's eyes were filming. That harrowing struggle of soul, that convulsive effort of the injured body, had demanded its price. The direful agony and its weakness had seized him--his stiffening fingers were slipping from the ledge of life, and he knew it.

He heard the bishop's earnest voice speaking from the void: "_Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends!_" The words roused his fading senses, called them back to the outpost of feeling.

"Not because I--loved," he said. "It--was because--I--was afraid!"

False as his habit of life had been, in that moment only the bare truth remained. With a last effort the dying man thrust his hand into his pocket, drew out a small, battered, red disk, and laid it in the other's hand. He smiled.

"Satan--" he whispered, as Harry bent over him, and the flicker of light fell in his eyes, "do you--think it will--count--when I cash in?"

But Harry's answer Hugh did not hear. He had pa.s.sed out of the sound of mortal speech for ever.

CHAPTER L

WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE

There came a day when the brown ravines of Smoky Mountain laughed in genial sunshine, when the tangled thickets, and the foliaged reaches, painted with the cardinal and bishop's-purple of late autumn, flushed and stirred to the touch of their golden lover, and the silver water gushing through the flumes sang to a quicker melody. There was no wind; everywhere, save for the breathing life of the forest, was dreamy beauty and waiting peace.

In the soft stillness Harry stood on the doorstep of the hillside cabin--for the last time. Below him in the gulch the light glanced and sparkled from the running flume, and beyond glimmered the long street of the town where the dead past of Satan Sanderson had been buried for ever and the old remorseful pain of conscience had found its surcease. In that last lack-l.u.s.ter year before the rector of the old St. James had been snuffed out in the wild motor-ride, he had come to doubt the ultimate Prescience and Purpose. How small and futile now seemed those doubts in face of the new conception he had apprehended, in the tacit acceptance of a watchful Will and Plan not his own.

Here had been the theater of his pain and his temptation. Sitting on that very spot, with the wise stars overhead, he had drawn from Old Despair's violin the strain that had brought him Jessica, her hand in his, her head upon his breast! In the far distance, a tender haze softening their outline, stood the violet silhouette of the enduring ranges, and far beyond them lay Aniston, where waited his newer life, his newer, better work--and the hope that was the April of his dreams.

Since that tragic day in the court-room he had seen Jessica once only--in the hour when the bishop's solemn "dust to dust" had been spoken above the man who had been her husband. One thought had comforted him--the town of Smoky Mountain had never known, need never know, the secret of her wifehood. And Aniston was far away. About the coming of Hugh injured and dying to his rescue, would be thrown a glamour of knight-errantry that would bespeak charity of judgment. When Jessica went back to the white house in the aspens she would meet only tenderness and sympathy. And that was well.

He shut the door of his cabin and, whistling to his dog, climbed the steep path, where the wrinkled creeper flung its new splash of scarlet, and along the trail to the k.n.o.b, under the needled song of the redwoods.

There in the dappled shade stood Jessica's rock-statue, and now it looked upon two mounds. The Prodigal had returned at last, father and son rested side by side, and that, too, was well.

He went slowly through the brown hollows to the winding mountain road, crossed it, and entered the denser forest. He wanted to see once more the dear spot where he and Jessica had met--that deep, sweet day before the rude awakening. He walked on in a reverie; his thoughts were very far away.

He stopped suddenly--there before him was the little knoll where she had stood waiting, on the threshold of his Palace of Enchantment, that one roseate morning. And she was there to-day--not standing with parted lips and eager eyes under the twittering trees, but lying face down on the moss, her red bronze hair shaming the gold of the fallen leaves.

There was a gesture in the outstretched arms that caught at his heart.

He stepped forward, and at the sound she looked up startled.

He saw the creeping color that mounted to her brow, the proud yet pa.s.sionate hunger of her eyes. He dropped on his knees and took her hands and kissed them:

"My dear love that is!" he whispered. "My dearer wife that is to be!"