The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 4

But with the realization he recognized a panama hat, from under whose brim escaped a breeze-stirred strand of dark hair, and promptly he stepped to the rail, his rubber-soled shoes making no sound.

The girl did not hear him, nor did she, as he found himself reflecting, feel his presence as lovers do in romances, and turn to greet him before he announced himself. But as she stood there in the shadow, with moonlight and starlight around her, his pulses quickened with an insupportable commotion of mingled hope and fear.

Her beauty was that of the aristocrat. It was this patrician quality which had first challenged his interest in her and answered to his own inordinate pride of self-confidence.

He had liked the lightness with which her small feet trod the earth and the prideful tilt of her exquisitely modeled chin.

After all, he had known her only a short time--and now he realized that he did not know her well: certainly not well enough to estimate with any surety how they would meet again, after an interval which had tarnished the name that had come to him from two generations of accrued distinction.

He bent forward, and, in a low voice, spoke her name, and she turned without a start so that she stood looking into his eyes.

"I suppose you know," he began, and for once he spoke without self-a.s.surance, "that I didn't hunt you out sooner because I wanted to spare you embarra.s.sment. I knew you were sailing by this boat--and so I took it, too."

She nodded her head, but remained silent. Her eyes met his and lingered, but they were like curtained windows and told him nothing.

It was as if she wished to let him pitch the plane of their meeting without interference, and he was grateful.

"I don't suppose," he began, forcing himself to speak with forthright directness, "I need protest my innocence to you--and I don't suppose I need confess that the stigma will stick to me--that in--some quarters--it will mean ostracism. I wanted to meet you the first time alone as much for your sake as my own."

"I know----" she agreed faintly, but there was no rush of confidence, of sympathy that thought only of the black situation in which he stood.

"I know, too," he went on with the same steadiness, "that but for your father's efforts I should have had to spend the rest of my life in prison. Above all, I know that your father made those efforts because you ordained it."

"It was too horrible," she whispered with a little shudder. "It was inconceivable."

"It still is," he reminded her. "There is a question, then, to be asked--a question for you to answer."

The girl's hands dropped on the rail and her fingers tightened as her eyes, deeply pained, went off across the wake. She seemed unable to help him, unable to do more than give back monosyllabic responses to the things he said.

"Of course, I can't a.s.sume that the promise you gave me--before all this--still stands, unless you can ratify it. I'm the same man, yet quite a different man."

At last she turned, and he saw that her lashes were wet with tears.

"Some day," she suggested almost pleadingly, "some day surely you will be able to clear your name--now that you're free to give yourself to it."

He shook his head, "That is going to be the purpose of my life," he answered. "But G.o.d only knows----"

"When you have done that," she impetuously exclaimed, "come back to me. I'll wait."

But Spurrier shook his head and stiffened a little, not indignantly, but painfully, and his face grew paler than it had yet been.

"That is generous of you," he said slowly. "That is the best I had the right to hope for--but it's not enough. It would be a false position for you--with a mortgage of doubt on your future. I've got to face this thing nakedly. I've got to depend only on those people who don't need proof--who simply know that I must be innocent of--of _this_ because it would be impossible for me to be guilty of it--people," he added, his voice rising with just a moment's betrayal of boyish pa.s.sion, "who will take the seeming facts, just as they are, and still say, 'd.a.m.n the facts!'"

"Can I do that?" She asked the question honestly, with eyes in which sincere tears glistened, and at last words came in freshet volume.

"Can I ignore the fact that father is in public life, where his affairs and those of his family are public property? You know he is talked of as presidential timber. Can I ask him to move heaven and earth to give you back your liberty--and then have his critics say that it was all for a member of his own family--a private use of public power?"

"Then you want your promise back?" he demanded quietly.

Suddenly the girl carried her hands to her face, a face all the lovelier for its distress. "I don't--know what--I want," she gasped.

Her lover stood looking down at her, and his temples grew coldly moist where the veins stood out.

"If you don't know what you want, dear, I know one thing that you can't do," he said. "Under these circ.u.mstances, your only chance of happiness would lie in your wanting one thing so much that the rest wouldn't count." He paused, and then he, too, moved aside and stood with her, leaning on the rail while in the phosph.o.r.escent play of the water and the broken reflections of the low-hung stars he seemed to find a sort of anodyne.

"I said that what you offered was the most I had the right to hope for. That was true. Your father's objections are legitimate. I owe you both more than I can ever pay--but I won't add to that debt."

"I thought," said the girl miserably, "that I loved you--enough for anything. The shock of all this--has made my mind swirl so that now--I'm not sure of anything."

"Yes," he said dully, "I understand."

Yet perhaps what he understood, or thought he understood, just then was either more or less than implied in the deferential compliance of his voice. This girl had given her promise to an officer and a gentleman with two generations of gallant army record behind him and a promising future ahead. She was talking now to one who, in the words of the Articles of War was neither an officer nor a gentleman and who had been saved from life imprisonment only by influence of her own importuning.

Her own distress of mind and incert.i.tude were so palpable and pathetic that the man had spoken with apology in his voice, because through him she had been forced into her dilemma. Yet, until now, he had been young enough and nave enough to believe in certain tenets of romance--and, in romance, a woman who really loved a man would not be weighing at such a time her father's aspirations toward the White House. In romance, even had he been as guilty as perdition, he would have stood in her eyes, incapable of crime. Palpably life and romance followed variant laws and, for a bitter moment, Spurrier wished that the senator had kept hands off, and left him to his fate.

He had heard the senator himself characterized as a man cold-bloodedly ambitious and contemptuous of others and, having seen only the genial side of that prominent gentleman, he had resentfully denied such statements and made mental comment of the calumny that attaches to celebrity.

Yet, Spurrier argued to himself, the girl was right. Quite probably if he had a sister similarly placed, he would be seeking to show her the need of curbing impulse with common sense.

From a steamer chair off somewhere at their backs came a low peal of laughter, and the orchestra was busy with a fox trot. For perhaps five minutes neither of them spoke again, but at last the girl twisted the ring from her finger. At least her loyalty had kept it there until she could remove it in his presence. She handed it to him and he turned it this way and that. The moonlight teased from its setting a jet of cold radiance.

Then Spurrier tossed it outward and watched the white arc of its bright vanishing. He heard a m.u.f.fled sob and saw the girl turn and start toward the companionway door. Instinctively he took a step forward following, then halted and stood where he was.

Later, Spurrier forced himself toward the smoke room where already under cigar and cigarette smoke, poker and bridge games were in progress, and where in little groups those men who were not playing discussed the topics of East and West. He was following no urge of personal fancy in entering that place, but rather obeying a resolution he had made out there on deck. Now that he had asked his question and had his answer there was nothing from which he could afford to hide.

He knew that he came heralded by the advance agency of gossip and that it behooved him from the start to meet and give back glance for glance: to declare by his bearing that he had no intention of skulking, and no apologies to make.

Yet, having reached the entrance from the deck, he hesitated, and while he still stood, with his back to the lighted door of the smoke room, he reeled under a sudden impact and was thrown against the rail.

Recovering himself with an exclamation of anger, Spurrier found himself confronting a man rising from his knees, whose awkwardness had caused the collision.

But the stumbling person having regained his feet, stood seemingly shaken by his fall, and after a moment, during which Spurrier eyed him with hostile silence, exclaimed:

"Plunger Spurrier!"

"That is not my name, sir," retorted the ex-officer hotly. "And it's not one that I care to have strangers employ."

The man drew back a step, and the light from the doorway fell across a face a little beyond middle age; showing a broad forehead and strongly chiseled features upon which sat an expression of directness and force.

"My apology is, at least, as ready as was my exclamation," declared the stranger in a pleasant voice that disarmed hostility. "The term was not meant offensively. I saw you at Oakland one day when a race was run, and I've heard certain qualities of yours yarned about at mess tables in the East. I ask your pardon."

"It's granted," acceded Spurrier of necessity. "And since you've heard of me, you doubtless know enough to make allowances for my short temper and excuse it."

"I _have_ heard your story," admitted the other man frankly. "My name is Snowdon. It's just possible you may have heard of me, too."

"You're not Snowdon the engineer: the Panama Ca.n.a.l man, the Chinese railway builder, are you?"

"I had a hand in those enterprises," was the answer, and with a slight bow the gentleman went his way.

The spot where the two men had stood talking was far enough aft to look down on the s.p.a.ce one deck lower and one degree farther astern, where, as through a well s.p.a.ce, showed the meaner life of the steerage. There was a light third-cla.s.s list on this voyage, and when Spurrier moved out of the obscurity which had been thrown over him by the life boat's shadow, he stood gazing idly down on an empty prospect. He gazed with an interest too moodily self-centered for easy inciting.

He himself stood now clear shown under the frosted globe of an overhead light and, after a little, roused to a tepid curiosity, he fancied he could make out what seemed to be a human figure that clung to the blackest of the shadows below him.