The Heart of Thunder Mountain Part 48

The day came when it seemed safe for Haig to stand and to move a little about the cave. He had fashioned slowly a pair of rude crutches, if they could be so called,--two pine limbs trimmed down with his pocketknife, with their natural forks left to fit under his arms. Marion protested that he was attempting this feat much too soon, but she was compelled to watch him in an agony of suspense lest he should fall on the hard floor of the cave, or rest his weight on the injured leg, and so undo all that had cost them so much of care and labor. But caution restrained him; for he was aware of the danger, though he was also half-mad with impatience to be a man once more.

Venturing only a few tentative steps at first, he steadily accustomed himself to movement with the aid of the awkward crutches, and in a few days was able to take up some of the work of their wretched habitation. Marion saw that this pleased him immensely, almost as if he had been a boy entrusted with a man's responsibility; and once, too, she saw him stand a long time before the row of notches on the wall, and thought his figure straightened, and a flush came into his pale cheek.

And then, in the sixth week of their imprisonment, Marion fell ill.

She had caught a cold, which was not the first by any means, but much more severe than its predecessors. With watery eyes and red noses and distressing coughs they had become familiar, but this was plainly a more serious matter. For three days more she dragged herself about, trying to conceal her state from him and from herself, but crying softly when he did not see her.

One morning, as the dawn crept into the cavern, she tried as usual to rise from her hard bed, and fell back with a stifled moan. Haig heard her, and raised his head quickly, struck by an unaccustomed note in her low cry.

"What is it, Marion?" he asked in alarm.

"It's no use, dear!" she whispered. "I can't get up."

For a moment he lay stricken, incapable of thought. Not that the event was unexpected. He had been reckoning on that; he had seen her steadily failing, and knew that she could not go on indefinitely under such privations. And yet, when it came, it was appalling. The grayness of the cave settled down upon him like a pall. Once he would have been indifferent to it, resigned to the knowledge that it was inevitable.

But now he had come, if not to share her hope, at least to sympathize with it, and to wish ardently for her sake that her faith might be justified. And it seemed a pitiable thing that she should have been deceived, an intolerable thing that she should die there so uselessly,--for him.

He moved over to her, and placed his hand on her forehead. It was burning hot.

"Water, please!" she gasped.

He hobbled to the entrance, and brought a cupful of snow, and melted it over the fire. She drank the water greedily, and begged for more.

But he told her gently that she must wait a little while. Then he sat thinking. What should be done with fever? It would probably be pneumonia, or something as fatal. And it would take her as the north wind takes the drooping petals of a rose.

He bent over her, and tried to soothe her with such futile words as came. The look she gave him went straight into deep, dark cells of his being that he thought had been closed and sealed forever. She begged him to eat; he must cook his own breakfast. Oh, but he must eat, or he should not be able to help her, she said. She would be quite well in a day or two; she was sure of that; and he must not get sick too. After he had been so patient and so good to her!

Haig turned away with a groan, and tried to obey her. But eat? Eat that repulsive food that he had choked down these many days only to please her, only to subscribe to her foolish faith? He could not! But presently she raised her head, and saw that he was not eating, and chided him. Whereupon he swallowed some morsels of the venison, and a.s.sured her that he had eaten heartily.

All that day she lay there, her face flushed, her eyes gleaming with a brightness that was more than the brightness of her indomitable spirit. When she smiled up at him he turned his face away that she might not see what he knew was written on it. And then he realized how much that smile had come to mean to him--how all unawares he had come to covet and to prize it--how he had half-consciously of late resorted to unexpected words and gestures to coax it to her lips.

There was no sleep for either of them that night. The next day Marion grew steadily worse, and toward evening she became delirious. And there was no concealment in this delirium as there had been in his.

All that he had not seen and heard and guessed before was now wholly revealed to him. He was permitted to see deep into the pure soul of the girl, into her very heart that was br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with love for him. His name came riding on every breath. It was Philip, Philip, Philip! And bit by bit, and fragment by fragment, he heard all the pitiful story of her love, of her petty stratagems, of the wicked little plot she had made, of the traps from which he had extricated himself, of the pretended sprain in her ankle, of her watching and waiting, of the anguish he had caused her, of her solitary communion with the stars on Mount Avalanche, of her dismissal of Hillyer, of her faith in the love that should not be denied and unrequited, of her prayers for a miracle that should bring him to her at last.

He looked down at the poor, small foot in its ragged shoe; yes, that was the foot that was "sprained." And how it had trudged, and dragged itself along for him, when every bone and muscle of her body ached! He looked at her hands, thin even in their swollenness, raw and bleeding, hard as a laborer's on the palms. How they had toiled and bled for him! For him! And what about him? What about Philip Haig?

He leaned back from her, and closed his eyes. And suddenly it seemed as if something fell away from them, as if something that had bound and imprisoned and blinded him had been rudely shattered. In one terrible, torturing revelation he saw clearly what he had been, what he had done, what a miserable wreck he had made of life, what a pitiable, dwarfed, misshapen thing his soul had become in comparison with the soul of this girl whom he had despised. He saw that he had lived a life of almost untouched egoism, setting his own wrongs above all the other wrongs in the world, counting his own griefs the greatest of all griefs, nursing his own tragedy as if it had been the first tragedy and the last. Bitterly, remorselessly he reviewed his selfishness, his hatred, his senseless rage, the heartlessness wrought by himself in a nature that had been, in the beginning, as pure, if not as precious and fine and beautiful, as hers.

And that was not all. He had taken woman for the special object of his hatred. He had made himself believe that all women were alike. Was there, then, only one kind of woman in a world filled with many kinds of men? Because he had been a fool, because he had been deceived by one woman, he had concluded, in his folly, that every woman was a vampire or a parasite,--"a rag and a bone and a hank of hair"!

And now there lay before him indeed (and the words took on a new and more terrible meaning) "a rag and a bone and a hank of hair." Yes, this was all that was left of her. This was what he had made of the most joyous and most beautiful creature that had ever crossed his path; this was the best he could do for one who had had the misfortune to love him and the courage to tell him so. This was his work! His memory went back to that day before the post-office. How beautiful she was then, how strangely beautiful, coming out of that halo of light by the side of the golden outlaw. Something had stirred within him then, as it had stirred again and again: at Huntington's when she reached for his revolver; in his cottage that last afternoon of her nursing.

And he had repulsed it, put it down, and trampled on it, as if it had been an execrable thing instead of the very treasure he had been seeking all his life without knowing what he sought. And now he recognized it for what it was--too late!

He bent nearer to her, listening.

"Philip! Philip!" she was saying, in tender, coaxing accents, with that quivering of her chin that had many times been almost irresistible.

Then came the final break-up of everything within him. He felt lifted as upon a flood, and a wild and pa.s.sionate longing surged through all his being. He leaned swiftly over her, and clasped her in his arms, and pressed her hot cheek against his own. And then--it was unendurable; he felt one of her arms softly encircling his neck. There was just one gentle pressure, and then the arm fell to her side, and her head sank weakly away from him. He laid her back tenderly on her hard bed.

He sat up again, looking at her and listening. She rambled on in half-coherent speech. She had not heard him cry out her name; or if she had heard him it had been only a part of her fevered dreams. And this was the crowning bitterness: that he should want to speak to her, to tell her that he loved her, and she could not hear; that he was too late, and she would never know.

He leaped to his feet in a whirling tempest of rage. He stumbled to the mouth of the cave, and thrust himself half through the barricade, and looked out into the wilderness of snow, and stood shaking his fist at it, quivering with pa.s.sion, and uttering the wildest imprecations upon the world, upon the outlaw, and upon himself. And gradually they centered upon himself alone; and he stood presently, as it were, naked before G.o.d, with something like a prayer unspoken, a silent, voiceless pet.i.tion rising from his tortured soul.

He became calm after that. A curious peace, it seemed, had flowed in upon him. Mechanically he renewed the fire, brought water and held it to Marion's lips, and eased her position on the bed. Then he sat by her side to wait!

Well, this was the end. She would be going soon,--to-morrow, or the day after. He glanced toward the shelf where Marion's rifle and his revolver lay. She would not be there now to s.n.a.t.c.h the weapon from his hand! But she would be waiting for him. And there came back to him the strange feeling he had experienced in his cottage--the pressure of her hand still warm on his own--her hand helping up and up and out of the Valley of the Shadow. And her hand would be stretched out for him--in the Beyond--

It must have been about the middle of the next forenoon--he had ceased to reckon time, and there were no more notches cut on the black wall of the cave--when Philip, sitting at Marion's side, observed a curious, restless movement of her head. She had lain all morning in a stupor, very still, with only an occasional murmur from her dry lips.

But now, moving her head from side to side, she tried to lift it, as if to listen.

"What is it, Marion?" asked Haig, leaning close to her.

"Listen!" she whispered.

He obeyed her, or pretended to, and turned an ear toward the mouth of the cavern. The wind was up with its wailing and its snarls and shrieks. He heard it for a moment, then looked at her again.

"My poor girl! My poor Marion!" he said.

"Listen!" she repeated, with a touching emphasis, almost childish, almost petulant.

He heard the storm.

"Yes, Marion," he said, humoring her.

"Can't you hear it?" she pleaded. "Listen!"

It was the delirium again; she was hearing things that were not, except in her disordered mind. Perhaps--he had read somewhere that the dying, those of them that are pure at heart, sometimes hear the calling of the--

"Somebody's--coming!" she cried in the thinnest, most childlike treble. Her face shone; she tried to sit up; she raised one hand feebly toward him.

"Please lie down, dear!" pleaded Haig, pressing her gently back.

She resisted him, smiling and frowning at the same time.

"Be--very--still. And--listen!" she persisted.

To please her, he sat erect, and listened. They were very still then, one of her hands between both of his. And the storm was raging. It was wilder, wilder. All the fury of Thunder Mountain seemed to be behind the wind that came shrieking and bellowing down the gulch.

The seconds pa.s.sed, with dead silence in the cave, and that bedlam let loose outside.

Then suddenly Haig lifted his head. What was it? There seemed to have come--No, it was but a mocking voice of the hurricane, one of the myriad voices of that wintry inferno, mocking them with a half-human cry. He looked sadly down at Marion, and saw that wondrous smile again upon her emaciated face. Oh, but this was maddening! Yet because she wished it, he listened again. And then, out of that tumult--very faint and far--

"My G.o.d! My G.o.d!" he shouted.

He leaped to his feet. He forgot his crutches. He flung himself across the floor of the cave in three reckless bounds, flung himself on the barrier of logs and limbs, clawing it like a maniac, or a wild beast, tore his way through it, and stood in the snow on the platform, calling into the storm, shrieking, bellowing, out-shrieking and out-bellowing the storm, swaying dizzily in the wind, and clutching at the air before him in a frenzy.

CHAPTER XXVIII