The Debatable Land Part 28

"It is not true!" She went in and saw lamps swinging the length of the saloon, where men were asleep on the sofas and the floor.

The engines throbbed and the paddle-wheels creaked and splashed near the window of her state-room. She lay awake, and yet seemed to hear sounds like a moaning organ, to see Gard's face floating, white and motionless, in black water, and moving down seaward with a tide that she tried to block with her hands. She started up, choking and sobbing, and heard the engines throb, the paddle-wheel creak and splash.

It was still dark when the steamer drew in to a wharf. Lights were moving about. There were three or four houses, a flag flapping sulkily in the wind, a train of cars and a puffing engine, a line of black bluffs against the sky. It was misty dawn when the train started south, and full sunrise when she stepped from the train with Mavering and saw a house with high porch on a hill; below, near a grove, the brigade hospital tents. The big, hurrying surgeon said: "Move him! Good G.o.d!--I beg your pardon--yes. It's run mighty low. It needs warming and coaxing.

There's da--I beg your pardon--there's very little of either here. This is the first time in six weeks the army of the Potomac has had any luck, to my knowledge." He looked at Helen suddenly, dropped his gallantry, and continued, gravely: "As to the chances, since you ask me, I suspect there are complications. But as an alternative to nights as cold as this, I should say, do almost anything." A moment's silence, and he went on: "They lie around here, about five hundred to an acre, several acres of them. That's the trouble. However, I knew Captain Windham. I admired him--this is the tent. I hope you have everything you need. Give him brandy and milk. The train goes back about eight. Good-bye." The big surgeon hurried away.

Mavering stepped in behind her, looked around, and said: "Exactly. The pirate's gone." Helen did not hear him. A pile of straw and some blankets, a black cloak, the white face against it, like one drowned and going seaward with a tide. She dropped on her knees and bent over it.

"Will you get the things," she half whispered, looking around--"a stretcher and some men? Please take my purse and come back in time for the train."

Mavering went out. In the way of descriptive adjectives he thought "fierce" was the word. She looked "fierce." "And," he reflected. "I dare say a man may turn out a domestic cat if he were half drowned and properly stroked and not too old. _Quien sabe?_ If the anchorite comes to, I'm gambling my gray hairs he's tamed. Gray hairs are distinctly a misfortune."

Helen leaned close over. The "must" and "shall" that absorbed her seemed straining at her eyes and lips. She felt as if she were lifting a weight. "You _must_, Gard, you _must_ stay"--struggling to keep the white face from going down in the suck of an undertow, drawn under by some blind power that knew no measures of values or who loved and remembered and who forgot.

Measure of values! Your bullet goes forth in a pointed manner, appears to be determined, purposeful, greatly in earnest, and buries itself in a sand-bank, or the brain of a scholar--all one to the bullet, all one to the rifleman who knows nothing of the matter, all one to the per cent.

of averages, to the flowing laws and far-off events of the universe.

"But you _must_, Gard, you _must_ stay." So tiny a torch to shake with such insistence at the wide night and call on its hurrying storms to stop! Enter demurral and private pet.i.tion to those high courts and abstract legislatures! "The const.i.tution does not provide for you in person."

"Then amend it. It should. It does me wrong. What are laws for if not for justice?"

"They are not at the call of human justice."

"Ah, then, not justice! But have pity, or forget and go by! Only let me keep him. I love him. I will not let him go."

The protest seems almost as persistent as the law. After all, it might be itself a law or an amendment in process of making, this protest. But if Gard Windham should not go on that adventure and exploration, inferred by Mavering to be, perhaps, Arctic in character, and should linger back to life in the course of event and not by virtue of an amendment, probably Helen would not care how it came about.

She did not care how the men with the stretcher looked, how they took off their caps or whispered. The moving train and the steamboat were vague things aside. Both were crowded, but no one spoke to her. It seemed to be arranged, recognized, and admitted.

A group gathered about Mavering on deck, who said: "Why, it appears to me a situation that doesn't admit of remark. It looks like a case of stand off and clear the road. It has that distinguished appearance." And there was a murmur of a.s.sent.

The wounded, sitting or lying about on both decks and in the cabin, were wretched and sinister sights. Some babbled in delirium; a few, like Gard, were sunk in torpor, unconscious of their issues. The steamer ploughed through splashing and gurgling water. The driven, wintry clouds streamed across the sky, gray and ragged as battle-torn banners. Hawks floated over the river, graceful in their savage hunt over the double-decked steamer loaded with human pain bound for the hospitals.

And Helen noticed and remembered nothing of it. She seemed to herself more like a ghost alone with Gard, who was another ghost. Empty s.p.a.ce was around them, the existence of both so tenuous that it consisted only of the faint pulse-beat in his wrist, which she held. This beat was the measure of the flight of time, and the slender thread that bound the world together. It used to seem to her that Gard was too intangible, almost unreal. One could not say what he was like. What did he mean by: "I don't care whether I'm an admirable person or not; I'm a partially illuminated point, floating along I don't know where or why. What's the use of caring? There's too much before and after?" Or: "Every one lives in a dungeon; he doesn't know any other dungeon than his own?" And when he used to play the organ in Saint Mary's and fill the great church with mystical voices, he had seemed to her something not of the daily world, but of a world partly like the one in which she built her own fanciful castles; only it was wider and more peculiar, and the powers in it were strong and strange. However apart from Gard himself her idea of him may have been, it was one which this long watch beside him, the touch of the slow pulse, and the knowledge of how closely he now at least moved along the frontier of shadows, only made more intimate. The organ was not needed to interpret him. She felt that she knew what he was like. She thought the pulse-beat spoke, as the organ used to speak, with the same swift, immediate presence, and that, when she whispered "You _must_ stay," it throbbed an answer: "You mean, come back. You've no idea how far it is down here, and very curious. But maybe I can, if you'll hold your end of whatever it is." And so the crowd and the murmur, the babbling in delirium of the man on the next stretcher, the laboring of the steamer ploughing up stream, the pa.s.sing of hours, all seemed moved apart from her. Sometimes the distant consciousness would seem to almost or quite return, and look out at her under wavering eyelashes. The lips moved, and she fancied they said, "I knew you were there." She became aware, at the same time, that the steamer had stopped, that the stretchers were being carried out in procession, and that over her stood Mavering, Rachel, and Thaddeus Bourn; and of these she was hardly aware enough to be surprised at Thaddeus. When they came to the house with the white door, and he drew her aside a moment, she half resisted in a dazed way, and felt as if not to be close to Gard were against nature and reason. Thaddeus drew her into the sitting-room.

The men had carried Gard to the room beyond. They had set down the stretcher and were moving him.

"In point of fact," began Thaddeus, "I've come to take you home. Your mother is--a--not so well. I fear it is quite serious. I wrote you, but it did not at that time seem serious. A woman of astonishing placidity, my dear, which I have sometimes felt tempted to recommend, in fact, to your imitation. But the circ.u.mstances are such now that it would not. I might say, be in good taste. Her condition is, I regret to say--seems to be--but perhaps to-morrow."

He was not sure she heard him.

"Oh yes, to-morrow."

To-morrow might be what it liked if he would let her go now. She slipped away. The men came out and left the house. Rachel followed with Mavering and closed the door. After a time Thaddeus said:

"Relative to a certain estate, Mrs. Mavering, in which you and I made investments, undertook a trusteeship, has it not, in your opinion, been administered somewhat--a--speculatively? It appears to me to be loaded, I might say, with liabilities. I do not see that the--a--securities are ascertained."

"Oh! but I think he will get well."

"Granted--and then?"

"He _must_ care for her."

"Granted--a--it would seem probable, and then?"

He deliberately refrained from looking at Mavering, who was examining Thaddeus, his gold-rimmed gla.s.ses and accurate tailoring, with speculative interest.

"I doubt whether you can argue from me," said Mavering, serenely. Rachel flushed and Thaddeus protested.

"Oh, I beg--"

"Not at all. It is admitted that the garb of civil society has never fitted me. Any coat will go on me, but none will fit to the satisfaction of fashion. But as to the anchorite, I would not argue a parallel. I suspect he will cut his coat to newer fashions than mine--possibly than yours. My dear sir, I'm an egoist and you're an egoist."

"True," murmured Thaddeus, "a social egoist."

Mavering stopped long enough to reflect that he liked this Thaddeus Bourn, a man apparently with conversations in him.

"Very good. And so it occurs to me in pa.s.sing that I may be the more elementary, anterior type; and, say, Morgan Map, a still further elementary, anterior, antediluvian--"

"Excellent!" cried Thaddeus; "excellent choice of phrase! My idea exactly! I said a primary, primitive, primordial."

"Good words, all of them--descriptive and discreet."

The two smiled at each other with appreciation.

"Map might do," continued Mavering, "if he had all the room there was.

He needs more room, properly for his state of culture, even than I do.

Now the anchorite--I refer to Captain Windham--is, if an egoist, possibly a fourth kind; I am inclined to think--to question--whether we might not argue him even in advance in continuance of this theory, which. I perceive you agree with me, is not without interest."

"But," said Thaddeus, distinguishing, marking precision with his eye-gla.s.s, held between two fingers, "as regards, now, a definition."

"I leave it to your more discriminating choice. I contribute this observation, however, that when the anchorite wants more room he is apt to climb into the air for it, instead of quarrelling with his neighbors on the earth."

Mavering took his leave. Rachel went to the window and stood looking after him. Thaddeus polished his gla.s.ses, and thought that Mavering was evidently a man with conversation in him.

Chapter XXII

Of Mavering, Who Disappears--Of the Gray Poet--Of Morgan, Who Appears Once More

When Gard returned to the knowledge of the light, he brought with him the impression that Helen was near. It was an irritating shock not to find her. He remembered a number of widely separated moments when he had been conscious of physical things--unless all these were vagrant dreams: the rain on the tent, the surgeon, the bitter cold, and Helen sitting there holding his wrist. The last was a portrait without surroundings or background. Her hair was pushed away from her forehead, and her eyes had seemed to probe and search for him down wherever he was lost.

Mrs. Mavering sat beside him now. She shook her head to signify silence when he wished to say something, to question her about this doubt; so that he fell to staring at the ceiling and trying to work his brain, How slowly the ideas moved, how reluctant they were, how pale and unsuggestive! To remember something was to pull a long, sagging rope, until at last the remembrance would emerge from a tideless, flat sea in a drowned condition. It was exasperating of Helen not to be there. The exasperation lasted four months.

The days and weeks slipped by, marked less by nights and days than by bits of information given and a.s.similated at intervals. He learned where he was and how he came there, and brooded over the subject, turned it slowly in his mind, and concluded to go on turning it. It had innumerable sides, surfaces, depths--some that were astonishing, some that melted into day dreams. It seemed to him that he was on the way to recover in time--a doctor, in fact, with side whiskers, gray and pendent, came periodically, and stated as much in a loud voice, and in that case he was glad that life looked interesting and came towards him with shining approach. The winter sunlight falling through clear panes under white, translucent curtains was as if newly washed.

It is said that the secret of the strong, temperate zones lies in their winter and spring, the antiseptic storms, the trance, and burial, and then the cleansed revival, the issues of a fresh seed-time. And there appear to be certain bitter waters, flowing near the roots of existence, in which, if it so happens to a man, he may wash his eyes clear of confusion, and afterwards wonder how it came that he was once weary of living. So it seemed to Gard that he had gone around a circle and begun a new season of expectation. He was that black-robed acolyte again, slim and somewhat pale, who, in breathless eagerness to see and know, had come out of the door of the brotherhood's brick-walled court-yard into the hurrying avenue, hearing the high fluting. "Follow, follow," looking for a banner and sword and shield, possibly for a girl in the brakes with sunlight on her hair, at least for something he had not tried to explain to the Father Superior. Whatever his motives and purposes then, they had become clouded since, and were clear again, and calling, "It is time to be alive and out among the melodies." It was good--the mere living; a handsomely furnished world, with a number of things in it.

Mrs. Mavering went away in the late winter. Widow Bourn died in January, when wild winds and snows were beating against the combative little church, and Helen was alone in the cottage, except for an elderly woman, depressed and angular, in the kitchen. Helen refused to go to Thaddeus, to his bewildered disgust. Mrs. Mavering, for some reason, did not think the refusal strange, but she became intent for the North as soon as she heard it.