The Hidden Places Part 5

He sat on his haunches in the snow, his elbows braced on his knees, and trained the powerful lenses upon her. In a matter of half a minute her gaze shifted, turned back to the river. She shrugged her shoulders, or perhaps it was a shiver born of the cold, and then went back inside.

Hollister rested the binoculars upon his knee. His face did not alter.

Facile expression was impossible to that marred visage. Pain or anger or sorrow could no longer write its message there for the casual beholder to read. The thin, twisted remnants of his lips could tighten a little, and that was all.

But his eyes, which had miraculously escaped injury, could still glow with the old fire, or grow dull and lifeless, giving some index to the mutations of his mind. And those darkly blue eyes, undimmed beacons amid the wreckage of his features, burned and gleamed now with a strange fire.

The woman who had been standing there staring up the hillside, with the sun playing hide and seek in her yellow hair, was Myra Hollister, his wife.

CHAPTER VI

Hollister sat in the snow, his gaze fixed upon this house on the river bank, wrestling with all the implications of this incredible discovery. He could neither believe what he had seen nor deny the evidence of his vision. He kept watch, with the gla.s.ses ready to fix upon the woman if she emerged again. But she did not reappear. The cold began to chill his body, to stiffen his limbs. He rose at last and made his way along the cliff, keeping always a close watch on the house below until he came abreast of his own quarters and turned reluctantly into the hollow where the cedars masked the log cabin.

He cooked a meal and ate his food in a mechanical sort of abstraction, troubled beyond measure, rousing himself out of periods of concentration in which there seemed, curiously, to be two of him present,--one questioning and wondering, the other putting forward critical and sneering answers, pointing out the folly of his wonder.

In the end he began to entertain a real doubt not only of the correctness of his sight, but also of his sanity. For it was clearly impossible, his reason insisted, that Myra would be pioneering in those snowy solitudes, that she should live in a rude shack among stumps on the fringe of a wilderness. She had been a creature of luxury. Hollister could not conceive a necessity for her doing this.

He had so arranged his affairs when he went to France that she had access to and complete control of his fortune. When she disclosed to him by letter the curious transformation of her affections, he had not revoked that arrangement. In the bewildering shock of that disclosure his first thought had not been a concern for his property. And the official report of him as killed in action which followed so soon after had allowed her to reap the full benefit of this situation. When she left London, if indeed she had left London, with her new a.s.sociate in the field of emotion she had at least forty-five thousand dollars in negotiable securities.

And if so--then why?

Hollister's reason projected him swiftly and surely out of pained and useless speculation into forthright doing. From surety of what he had seen he pa.s.sed to doubt, to uneasiness about himself: for if he could not look at a fair-haired woman without seeing Myra's face, then he must be going mad. He must know, beyond any equivocation.

There was a simple way to know, and that way Hollister took while the embers of his noonday fire still glowed red on the hearth. He took his gla.s.ses and went down to the valley floor.

It would have been a simple matter and the essence of directness to walk boldly up and rap at the door. Certainly he would not be recognized. He could account for himself as a traveler in need of matches, some trifling thing to be borrowed. The wilderness is a destroyer of conventions. The pa.s.ser-by needs to observe no ceremony.

He comes from nowhere and pa.s.ses into the unknown, unquestioned as to his name, his purpose, or his destination. That is the way of all frontiers.

But Hollister wished to see without being seen. He did not know why.

He did not attempt to fathom his reluctance for open approach. In the social isolation which his disfigurement had inflicted upon him, Hollister had become as much guided by instinct in his actions and impulses as by any coldly reasoned process. He was moved to his stealthy approach now by an instinct which he obeyed as blindly as the crawling worm.

He drew up within fifty yards of the house, moving furtively through thickets that screened him, and took up his post beside a stump. He peered through the drooping boughs of a clump of young cedar. There, in perfect concealment, hidden as the deer hides to let a roving hunter pa.s.s, Hollister watched with a patience which was proof against cold, against the discomfort of snow that rose to his thighs.

For an hour he waited. Except for the wavering smoke from the stovepipe, the place might have been deserted. The house was one with the pervading hush of the valley. Hollister grew numb. But he held his post. And at last the door opened and the woman stood framed in the opening.

She poised for an instant on the threshold, looking across the river.

Her gaze pivoted slowly until it encompa.s.sed the arc of a half-circle, so that she faced Hollister squarely. He had the binoculars focused on her face. It seemed near enough to touch. Then she took a step or two gingerly in the snow, and stooping, picked up a few sticks from a pile of split wood. The door closed upon her once more.

Hollister turned upon the instant, retraced his steps across the flat, gained the foot of the steep hill and climbed step by step with prodigious effort in the deep snow until he reached the cabin.

He had reaffirmed the evidence of his eyes, and was no longer troubled by the vague fear that a disordered imagination had played him a disturbing trick. He had looked on his wife's face beyond a question.

He accepted this astounding fact as a man must accept the indubitable.

She was here in the flesh,--this fair-haired, delicate-skinned woman whose arms and lips had once been his sure refuge. Here, in a rude cabin on the brink of a frozen river, chance had set her neighbor to him. To what end Hollister neither knew nor wished to inquire. He said to himself that it did not matter. He repeated this aloud. He believed it to be true. How _could_ it matter now?

But he found that it did matter in a way that he had not reckoned upon. For he found that he could not ignore her presence there. He could not thrust her into the outer darkness beyond the luminous circle of his thoughts. She haunted him with a troublesome insistence.

He had loved her. She had loved him. If that love had gone glimmering there still remained memory from which he could not escape, memories of caresses and embraces, of mutual pa.s.sion, of all they had been to each other through a time when they desired only to be all things to each other. These things arose like ghosts out of forgotten chambers in his mind. He could not kill memory, and since he was a man, a physically perfect man, virile and unspent, memory tortured him.

He could not escape the consequences of being, the dominant impulses of life. No normal man can. He may think he can. He may rest secure for a time in that belief,--but it will fail him. And of this Hollister now became aware.

He made every effort to shake off this new besetment, this fresh a.s.sault upon the tranquility he had attained. But he could not abolish recollection. He could not prevent his mind from dwelling upon this woman who had once meant so much to him, nor his flesh from responding to the stimulus of her nearness. When a man is thirsty he must drink.

When he is hungry food alone can satisfy that hunger. And there arose in Hollister that ancient s.e.x-hunger from which no man may escape.

It had been dormant in him for a time; dormant but not dead. In all his life Hollister had never gone about consciously looking upon women with a l.u.s.tful eye. But he understood life, its curious manifestations, its sensory demands, its needs. For a long time pain, grief, suffering of body and anguish of mind had suppressed in him every fluttering of desire. He had accepted that apparent snuffing out of pa.s.sion thankfully. Where, he had said to himself when he thought of this, where would he find such a woman as he could love who would find pleasure in the embrace of a marred thing like himself? Ah, no.

He had seen them shrink too often from mere sight of his twisted face.

The fruits of love were not for the plucking of such as he. Therefore he was glad that the urge of s.e.x no longer troubled him.

Yet here in a brief span, amid these silent hills and dusky forests where he had begun to perceive that life might still have compensations for him, this pa.s.sivity had been overthrown, swept away, destroyed. He could not look out over the brow of that cliff without thinking of the woman in the valley below. He could not think of her without the floodgates of his recollection loosing their torrents. He had slept with her head pillowed in the crook of his arm. He had been wakened by the warm pressure of her lips on his. All the tender intimacies of their life together had lurked in his subconsciousness, to rise and torture him now.

And it was torture. He would tramp far along those slopes and when he looked too long at some distant peak he would think of Myra. He would sit beside his fireplace with one of Doris Cleveland's books in his hand and the print would grow blurred and meaningless. In the glow of the coals Myra's face would take form and mock him with a seductive smile. Out of the gallery of his mind pictures would come trooping, and in each the chief figure was that fair-haired woman who had been his wife. At night while he slept, he was hounded by dreams in which the conscious repression of his waking hours went by the board and he was delivered over to the fantastic deviltries of the subconscious.

Hollister had never been a sentimental fool, nor a sensualist whose unrestrained pa.s.sions muddied the streams of his thought. But he was a man, aware of both mind and body. Neither functioned mechanically.

Both were complex. By no effort of his will could he command the blood in his veins to course less hotly. By no exercise of any power he possessed could he force his mind always to do his bidding. He did not love this woman whose nearness so profoundly disturbed him. Sometimes he hated her consciously, with a volcanic intensity that made his fingers itch for a strangling grip upon her white throat. She had ripped up by the roots his faith in life and love at a time when he sorely needed that faith, when the sustaining power of some such faith was his only shield against the daily impact of bloodshed and suffering and death, of all the nerve-shattering accompaniments of war.

Yet he suffered from the spur of her nearness, those haunting pictures of her which he could not bar out of his mind, those revived memories of alluring tenderness, of her clinging to him with soft arms and laughter on her lips.

He would stand on the rim of the cliff, looking down at the house by the river, thinking the unthinkable, attracted and repulsed, a victim to his imagination and the fever of his flesh, until it seemed to him sometimes that in the loaded chamber of his rifle lay the only sure avenue of escape from these vain longings, from unattainable desire.

Slowly a desperate resolution formed within his seething brain, shadowy at first, recurring again and again with insistent persuasion, until it no longer frightened him as it did at first, no longer made him shrink and feel a loathing of himself.

She was his wife. She had ceased to care for him. She had given herself to another man. No matter, she was still his. Legally, beyond any shadow of a doubt. The law and the Church had joined them together. Neither man nor G.o.d had put them asunder, and the law had not released them from their bonds. Then, if he wanted her, why should he not take her?

Watching the house day after day, hours at a stretch, Hollister brooded over this new madness. But it no longer seemed to him madness.

It came to seem fit and proper, a matter well within his rights. He postulated a hypothetical situation; if he, officially dead, resurrected himself and claimed her, who was there to say him nay if he demanded and exacted a literal fulfilment of her solemn covenant to "love, honor, and obey?" She herself? Hollister snapped his fingers.

The man she lived with? Hollister dismissed him with an impatient gesture.

The purely animal man, which is never wholly extinguished, which merely lurks unsuspected under centuries of cultural veneer to rise l.u.s.tily when slowly acquired moralities shrivel in the crucible of pa.s.sion, now began to actuate Hollister with a strange cunning, a ferocity of antic.i.p.ation. He would repossess himself of this fair-haired woman. And she should have no voice in the matter. Very well. But how?

That was simplicity itself. No one knew such a man as he was in the Toba country. All these folk in the valley below went about unconscious of his existence in that cabin well hidden among the great cedars. All he required was the conjunction of a certain kind of weather and the absence of the man. Falling snow to cover the single track that should lead to this cabin, to bury the dual footprints that should lead away. The absence of the man was to avoid a clash: not because Hollister feared that; simply because in his mind the man was not a factor to be considered, except as the possibility of his interference should be most easily avoided. Because if he did interfere he might have to kill him, and that was a complication he did not wish to invoke. Somehow he felt no grudge against this man, no jealousy.

The man's absence was a common occurrence. Hollister had observed that nearly every day he was abroad in the woods with a gun. For the obscuring storm, the obliterating snowfall, he would have to wait.

All this, every possible contingency, took form as potential action in his obsessed mind,--with neither perception nor consideration of consequences. The consummation alone urged him. The most primitive instinct swayed him. The ultimate consequences were as nothing.

This plan was scarcely formed in Hollister's brain before he modified it. He could not wait for that happy conjunction of circ.u.mstances which favored action. He must create his own circ.u.mstances. This he readily perceived as the better plan. When he sought a way it was revealed to him.

A few hundred yards above the eastern limit of the flat where his canoe was cached, there jutted into the river a low, rocky point. From the river back to the woods the wind had swept the bald surface of this little ridge clear of snow. He could go down over those sloping rocks to the glare ice of the river. He could go and come and leave no footprints, no trace. There would be no mark to betray, unless a searcher ranged well up the hillside and so came upon his track.

And if a man, searching for this woman, bore up the mountain side and came at last to the log cabin--what would he find? Only another man who had arisen after being dead and had returned to take possession of his own!

Hollister threw back his head and burst into sardonic laughter. It pleased him, this devastating jest which he was about to perpetrate upon his wife and her lover.

From the seclusion of the timber behind this point of rocks he set himself to watch through his gla.s.ses the house down the river. The second day of keeping this vigil he saw the man leave the place, gun in hand, cross on the river ice and vanish in the heavy timber of that wide bottom land. Hollister did not know what business took him on these recurrent absences; hunting, he guessed, but he had noted that the man seldom returned before late in the afternoon, and sometimes not till dusk.

He waited impatiently for an hour. Then he went down to the frozen river. Twenty minutes' rapid striding brought him to the door of the house.

The place was roughly built of split cedar. A door and a window faced the river. The window was uncurtained, a bald square of gla.s.s. The sun had grown to some little strength. The air that morning had softened to a balminess like spring. Hollister had approached unseen over snow softened by this warmth until it lost its frosty crispness underfoot.

Now, through the uncurtained window, his gaze marked a section of the interior, and what he saw stayed the hand he lifted to rap on the door.