The Hidden Places Part 22

But it was weary work to nurse that sense of impending calamity, to find his brain ceaselessly active upon the forecast of a future in which he should walk alone, and while he was thus hara.s.sed still to keep up a false cheerfulness before Doris. She was abnormally sensitive to impressions. A tone spoke volumes to her. He did not wish to disturb her by his own anxiety at this critical period.

All the while, little by little, her sight was coming She could distinguish now any violent contrast of colors. The blurred detail of form grew less p.r.o.nounced. In the chaos of sensory impressions she began to distinguish order; and, when she began to peer unexpectedly at the people she met, at the chubby boy in his cot, at her husband's face, Hollister could stand it no longer. He was afraid, afraid of what he might see in those gray eyes if she looked at him too long, too closely.

He was doubly sensitive now about his face because of those weeks among strangers, of going about in crowded places where people stared at him with every degree of morbid curiosity, exhibiting every shade of feeling from a detached pity to open dislike of the spectacle he presented. That alone weighed heavily on him. Inaction rasped at his nerves. The Toba and his house, the grim peaks standing aloof behind the timbered slopes, beckoned him back to their impa.s.sive, impersonal silences, those friendly silences in which a man could sit and think--and hope. A man doomed to death must prefer a swift end to a lingering one. Hollister gradually came to the idea that he could not possibly sit by and watch the light of comprehension steal slowly into his wife's eyes. Better that she should fully regain her sight, and then see with what manner of man she had lived and to whom she had borne a son. Then if she could look at him without recoiling, if the essential man meant more to her than the ghastly wreckage of his face, all would be well. And if not,--well, then, one devastating buffet from the mailed fist of destiny was better than the slow agony of daily watching the crisis approach.

So Hollister put forth the plausible fact that he must see about his affairs and took the next steamer for the Toba.

Lawanne, expecting letters, was at the float to meet the steamer.

Hollister went up-stream with him. They talked very little until they reached Lawanne's cabin. There was a four-mile current to buck, and they saved their breath for the paddles. Myra Bland waved as they pa.s.sed, and Hollister scarcely looked up. He was in the grip of a strange apathy. He was tired, physically weary. His body was dull and heavy, sluggish. So was his mind. He was aware of this, aware that a nervous reaction of some sort was upon him. He wished that he could always be like that,--dull, phlegmatic, uncaring. To cease thinking, to have done with feeling, to be a clod, dead to desires, to high hopes and heart-numbing fears.

"Come in and have a cup of tea and tell me the latest Vancouver scandal," Lawanne urged, when they beached the canoe.

Hollister a.s.sented. He was as well there as anywhere. If there were an antidote in human intercourse for what afflicted him, that antidote lay in Archie Lawanne. There was no false sentiment in Lawanne. He did not judge altogether by externals. His was an understanding, curiously penetrating intelligence. Hollister could always be himself with Lawanne. He sat down on the gra.s.s before the cabin and smoked while Lawanne looked over his letters. The Chinese boy brought tea and sandwiches and cake on a tray.

"Mrs. Hollister is recovering her sight?" Lawanne asked at length.

Hollister nodded.

"Complete normal sight?"

Hollister nodded again.

"You don't seem overly cheerful about it," Lawanne said slowly.

"You aren't stupid," Hollister replied. "Put yourself in my place."

It was Lawanne's turn to indicate comprehension and a.s.sent by a nod.

He looked at Hollister appraisingly, thoughtfully.

"She gains the privilege of seeing again. You lose--what? Are you sure you stand to lose anything--or is it simply a fear of what you may lose?"

"What can I expect?" Hollister muttered. "My face is bound to be a shock. I don't know how she'll take it. And if when she sees me she can't stand me--isn't that enough?"

"I shouldn't worry, if I were you," Lawanne encouraged. "Your wife is a little different from the ordinary run of women, I think. And, take it from me, no woman loves her husband for his Grecian profile alone.

Nine times out of ten a man's looks have nothing to do with what a woman thinks of him, that is if she really knows him; whereas with a man it is usually the other way about, until he learns by experience that beauty isn't the whole works--which a clever woman knows instinctively."

"Women shy away from the grotesque, the unpleasant," Hollister declared. "You know they do. I had proof of that pretty well over two years. So do men, for that matter. But the women are the worst. I've seen them look at me as if I were a loathsome thing."

"Oh, rats," Lawanne returned irritably. "You're hyper-sensitive about that face of yours. The women--well, take Mrs. Bland as an example. I don't see that the condition of your face makes any great difference to her. It doesn't appear to arouse any profound distaste on her part."

Hollister could not counter that. But it was an argument which carried no weight with him. For if Myra could look at him without a qualm, Hollister knew it must be because her mind never quite relinquished the impression of him as he used to be in the old days. And Doris had nothing like that to mitigate the sweeping impression of first sight, which Hollister feared with a fear he could not shake off by any effort of his will.

He went on up to his own house. The maple tree thrust one heavy-leaved branch over the porch. The doors were shut. All about the place hung that heavy mantle of stillness which wraps a foresaken home, a stillness in which not even a squirrel chattered or a blue-jay lifted his voice, and in which nothing moved. He stood amid that silence, hearing only a faint whisper from the river, a far-off monotone from the falls beyond the chute. He felt a heaviness in his breast, a sickening sense of being forsaken.

He went in, walked through the kitchen, looked into the bedroom, came back to the front room, opening doors and windows to let in the sun and air and drive out the faint, musty odor that gathers in a closed house. A thin film of dust had settled on the piano, on chairs, on the table. He stood in the middle of the room, abandoned to a horrible depression. It was so still, so lonely, in there. His mind, quick to form images, likened it to a crypt, a tomb in which all his hopes laid buried. That was the effect it had on him, this deserted house. His intelligence protested against submitting to this acceptance of disaster prior to the event, but his feelings overrode his intelligence. If Doris had been lying white and still before him in her coffin, he could not have felt more completely that sense of the futility of life, of love, of hope, of everything. As he stood there, one hand in his pocket, the other tracing with a forefinger an aimless pattern in the dust on the piano, he perceived with remarkable clarity that the unhappiness he had suffered, the loneliness he had endured before he met Doris Cleveland was nothing to what now threatened, to what now seemed to dog his footsteps with sinister portent.

In the bedroom occupied by their housekeeper stood the only mirror in the house. Hollister went in there and stood before it, staring at the presentment of himself in the gla.s.s. He turned away with a shiver. He would not blame her if with clear vision she recoiled from that. He could expect nothing else. Or would she endure that frightful mien until she could first pity, then embrace? Hollister threw out his hands in a swift gesture of uncertainty. He could only wait and see, and meanwhile twist and turn upon the grid. He could not be calm and detached and impersonal. For him there was too much at stake.

He left all the doors and windows wide and climbed the hill. If he were to withstand the onslaught of these uncertainties, these forebodings which pressed upon him with such d.a.m.nable weight, he must bestir himself. He must not sit down and brood. He knew that. It was not with any particular enthusiasm that he came upon his crew at work, that his eye marked the widening stump-dotted area where a year before the cedars stood branch to branch, nor when he looked over the long ricks of bolts waiting that swift plunge down the chute.

Bill Hayes gave a terse account of his stewardship during Hollister's absence. So many cords of bolts cut and boomed and delivered to the mill. Hollister's profits were accelerating, the fruit of an insatiable market, of inflated prices. As he trudged down the hill, he reflected upon that. He was glad in a way. If Doris could not or would not live with him, he could make life easy for her and the boy. Money would do that for them. With a strange perverseness, his mind dwelt upon the most complete breaking up of his domestic life. It persisted in shadowing forth scenes in which he and Doris took part, in which it was made plain how and why they could no longer live together. In Hollister's mind these scenes always ended by his crying despairingly "If you can't, why, you can't, I suppose. I don't blame you." And he would give her the bigger half of his funds and go his way. He would not blame her for feeling like that. Nevertheless, Hollister had moments when he felt that he would hate her if she did,--a paradox he could not understand.

He slept--or at least tried to sleep--that night alone in his house.

He cooked his breakfast and worked on the boom until midday, then climbed the hill to the camp and ate lunch with his men. He worked up there till evening and came down in the dusk. He dreaded that lonely house, those deserted rooms. But he forced himself to abide there. He had a dim idea of so disciplining his feelings, of attaining a numbed acquiescence in what he could not help.

Some one had been in the house. The breakfast dishes were washed, the dust cleared away, the floor swept, his bed made. He wondered, but gave credit to Lawanne. It was like Archie to send his Chinese boy to perform those tasks.

But it was Myra, he discovered by and by. He came off the hill in mid-afternoon two days later and found her clearing up the kitchen.

"You don't mind, do you?" she asked. "I have nothing much to do at home, and it seems a shame for everything here to be neglected. When is Doris coming back?"

"I don't know exactly. Perhaps two or three weeks, perhaps as many months."

"But her eyes will be all right again?"

"So they say."

Hollister went out and sat on the front doorstep. His mind sought to span the distance to Vancouver. He wondered what Doris was doing. He could see her sitting in a shaded room. He could see young Robert waving fat arms out of the cushioned depths of his carriage. He could see the sun glittering on the sea that spread away westward, from beneath the windows of the house where they lived. And Doris would sit there antic.i.p.ating the sight of all those things which had been hidden in a three-year night,--the sea rippling in the sun, the distant purple hills, the nearer green of the forest and of gra.s.s and flowers, all the light and color that made the world beautiful. She would be looking forward to seeing him. And that was the stroke which Hollister dreaded, which made him indifferent to other things.

He forgot Myra's presence. Six months earlier he would have resented her being there, he would have been uneasy. Now it made no difference.

He had ceased to think of Myra as a possible menace. Lately he had not thought of her or her affairs at all.

She came now and sat down upon the porch step within arm's length of him, looking at him in thoughtful silence.

"Is it such a tragedy, after all?" she said at last.

"Is what?"

He took refuge in refusal to understand, although he understood instantly what Myra meant. But he shrank from her intuitive penetration of his troubled spirit. Like any other wounded animal, he wanted to be left alone.

"You know what I mean," she said. "You are afraid of Doris seeing you.

That's plain enough. Is it so terrible a thing, after all? If she can't stand the sight of your face, you're better off without her."

"It's easy to be philosophic about some one else's troubles,"

Hollister muttered. "You can be off with one love and be reasonably sure of another before long. I can't. I'm not made that way, I don't think. And if I were, I'm too badly handicapped."

"You haven't a very charitable opinion of me, have you, Robin?" she said reflectively. "You rather despise me for doing precisely what you yourself have done, making a bid for happiness as chance offered. Only I haven't found it, and you have. So you are morally superior, and your tragedy must naturally be profound because your happiness seems threatened."

"Oh, d.a.m.n the moral considerations," he said wearily. "It isn't that.

I don't blame you for anything you ever did. Why should I? I'm a bigamist. I'm the father of an illegitimate son. According to the current acceptance of morality, I've contaminated and disgraced an innocent woman. Yet I've never been and am not now conscious of any regrets. I don't feel ashamed. I don't feel that I have sinned. I merely grasped the only chance, the only possible chance that was in reach. That's all you did. As far as you and I are concerned, there isn't any question of blame."

"Are you sure," she asked point-blank, "that your face will make any difference to Doris?"

"How can it help?" he replied gloomily. "If you had your eyes shut and were holding in your hands what you thought was a pretty bird and suddenly opened your eyes and saw it was a toad, wouldn't you recoil?"

"Your simile is no good. If Doris really loved you, it was not because she pictured you as a pretty bird. If she could love you without seeing you, if you appealed to her, why should your marred face make her turn away from you?"

But Hollister could not explain his feeling, his deep dread of that which seemed no remote possibility but something inevitable and very near at hand. He did not want pity. He did not want to be merely endured. He sat silent, thinking of those things, inwardly protesting against this miraculous recovery of sight which meant so great a boon to his wife and contained such fearful possibilities of misery for himself.