The Tempering Part 59

Boone leaned back and drew from his pocket the key that would unlock an answer to his questionings. He thrust it into the keyhole and then, as a spasm of pain crossed his face, hesitated.

Once he had done that, he should have admitted to himself that he had abandoned hope, and he realized that he could not bring himself, even after five years, to that admission.

For a long while he sat hesitant. A squirrel chattered; a woodp.e.c.k.e.r rapped high overhead on a dead limb, and at last the young man thrust the key back into his pocket and carried the metal strong box into the house again, unopened.

Boone had ordained it as his law that when thoughts of Anne came into his mind, he would not entertain them; that a seal had been placed on those closed pages of his experience; but it was a law which he had no power of enforcing on his heart, and as he came out again into the sunlight he was thinking of her.

He had never known in its true baldness the dependence of mother and daughter upon the bounteous generosity of their kinsman, and without that knowledge he had not guessed that Anne's departure from Louisville had been an adventure, daring everything.

All that he knew, or fancied he knew, was that even when she had broken with Morgan she had felt no need of him, and it had been her callous wish to live as if she had never known him. Since love is set in the most delicate and intricate bearings of life, and holds in its own core the possibilities of hate, he fancied that he felt for the Anne Masters of his past adoration the present contempt due a woman who had been able only to trifle with a life she had shaped. Because, too, she had once saved that life from its threatened smirching, the grat.i.tude which might have been his most treasured sentiment became to him an intolerable obligation.

Standing there by the door, the man's face darkened, until for the moment it wore again the sombre and sullen hate that had marred its boyhood. The hands at his side closed into fists, and looking off across the hills, he said aloud:

"It was a dream that well-nigh wrecked me. I never want to see her or hear of her again!"

But after a moment the bitterness turned to longing, and with an indignant voice, as though denouncing an enemy who stood before him, he broke out tempestuously: "That's a lie! You love her.... You always will!"

Then around the abrupt turn of the road came a horseman, and Boone recognized him, with astonishment, as Morgan Wallifarro, dust-covered and mounted on a livery beast.

But the Morgan who dismounted by the rail fence wore a face aged in a fashion that startled Boone. He was not the kidney that burns out in a few years of strenuosity, but a man with a mind of steel and a body of whipcord, and now his eyes were lined and ringed as they should not have been until his hair had turned white.

Boone supposed that some matter of party consultation had brought his unannounced guest, since they were both now men of leadership, so he inquired, after they had shaken hands:

"Is it politics, Morgan?"

Wallifarro nodded.

"In part that," he answered slowly, "but it's hard to pin one's mind down to party details today, Boone. It's like whistling a petty tune into the teeth of a hurricane."

"Hurricane?" Boone repeated the final word in a puzzled tone. "I don't follow you."

"My G.o.d, man," exclaimed the other, in sheer and undisguised amazement, "don't you know?"

"Know what? Remember that I've been in the backwoods for three weeks,"

smiled the hillsman, "and I haven't seen a paper for ten days."

Again for a moment the Louisville lawyer stood incredulously silent; then he said sharply:

"The war.... It's four days old and more.... Austria, Servia, Germany, Russia, France! They are all in it--and yesterday England came in."

The face of the member of the Foreign Affairs Committee wore a stunned blankness, and the blood went out of it. From the tree across the road the woodp.e.c.k.e.r began once more his hammering, and about the hoofs of the hitched horse drifted a cloud of pale-yellow b.u.t.terflies.

Finally Boone asked in a husky voice: "What of us?"

Morgan shook his head. "Two weeks ago," he said, "the whole thing was a sheer impossibility.... Now anything is possible."

Boone's mind had flashed back to McCalloway's prophecy.... "When that message of merging and common cause comes, it will come not on the wings of peace but belched from the mouths of guns--riding the gales of war."

"You are tired and hot," he found himself saying. "Let's go inside."

Later the mountain man reminded his guest: "But you came on another errand. What was it?"

Morgan, who had been seated, rose and paced the floor with his mouth tight drawn, and then stopping before his host, he broke out bluntly: "Once before, Boone, we talked about _her_. Now we must do it again."

Boone's shoulders stiffened, and his face froze into an unresponsive reserve. Even with McCalloway he had not been able to discuss Anne, and with Morgan it was impossible.

"Morgan," he answered very deliberately and guardedly, "it was Anne's wish to eliminate me from her scheme of things. To that wish I bowed, and what is sealed must remain sealed. In all candour--I can't talk of her."

"Can't talk of her!" Through the strained composure of Morgan's manner darted a flash of the old electric force. "When she may be suffering actual hunger, and you might help! Can you afford to say you can't talk of her?"

"Hunger? Help?" Boone's voice was one of deadly tenseness. "My G.o.d, man, don't bait me with words like that unless you mean them--and, if you do, don't waste time!"

For the first time the mountain man learned how Anne had burned her bridges behind her and disappeared from her own world; how so resourceful a lawyer as Morgan, employing every agency at his command, had failed to learn anything of her or her circ.u.mstances.

"It is as if," went on the lawyer desperately, "she had gone out of some cabin in a frozen wilderness--without provisions, without even matches or an axe, and G.o.d knows what she found there!"

The two Kentuckians stood gazing into each other's eyes across the table that lay between them. Upon the temples of each glistened beads of terror sweat. With the suddenness of revelation, Boone Wellver saw the falsity of all his bitter and fallacious judgments, and the love that he had denied swept over him with the onrush of an avalanche. Then he heard Morgan again:

"Between us--somehow we managed to do this for her. From babyhood she was under a coercion that neither of us appreciated. I don't know what parted you--but I know that I love her enough to be happy if I could see her married to you--and safe. I've hunted her and I haven't found her.

Perhaps she has hidden purposely from me. Perhaps she _wouldn't_ hide from you--"

Boone raised a hand, and it fell limply at his side. He dropped abruptly into a chair and cradled his face on his bent forearms. But after a short while he rose, lividly colourless of check, and said:

"I'll ride back with you. I'm going to New York to find her."

But when he had been a month in New York he knew as little as when he had come.

One morning he read a brief item hidden away on an inside page of his newspaper. A young woman had taken gas in a boarding house in the Forties. She had been there only a few days and, save by the name she had given, was unknown. A few dollars in change had been found in her bedroom, but no letters or identifying data. She was tall, well dressed, and had been beautiful. Her body lay, awaiting claim, in an undertaker's shop of given address. In default of identification, it would be turned over for burial among the pauper dead.

Boone Wellver dropped the paper and went stumblingly across his room for his hat. At his door he paused to steady the palsy that had seized him.

In his mind he was seeing a little girl at a Christmas dance, in a hall where the tempered glow of mahogany and silver awoke to the tiny fires of candle-light.

CHAPTER XLV

As Boone's taxi wrenched its way uptown, threading jerkily in and out between the pillars of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, he sought vainly to close the sluice gates of fear and hold his equilibrium by a self-hypnosis of arrested thought.

But words of newsprint broke through this fact.i.tious barrier. The "brown hair" of the reportorial description might be the same that McCalloway had called a disputed dominion along the border land of gold and brown.

The "evidences of former beauty" might be an unappreciative apprais.e.m.e.nt of _her_, badgered by misfortunes to her death.

Standing at last on the curb before the undertaker's establishment, Boone had to be reminded to pay his fare, because his attention dwelt with a morbid fascination on the gilt words, "Funeral Directors and Embalmers," etched on the black plate gla.s.s of the windows.

After an appreciable interval of struggle with panic, he drew himself together and went in through the open door, becoming instantly conscious of a subtle, chemical odour.

From his newspaper a man in broadly patterned green and lavender shirt-sleeves lifted his eyes without rising. On the desk beside him, however, ready at notice to convert him from the liveliness of colour which in private life he fancied to the sable formality of his art, stood celluloid cuffs and a made-up tie as black and sober as his caskets.