The Zeit-Geist Part 6

"Well," she said cheerily, "I don't believe in a man making a slave of himself, not to take a gla.s.s when he wants it just because he sometimes makes a beast of himself by taking more than he ought."

"If you choose to think black is white, Ann, it will not make it that way."

"That's true," she replied compliantly; "and you've got more call to know than I have, for I've never 'been there.'"

"G.o.d forbid!" he said with sudden intensity. All the habits of thought of the last year put strength into his words. "If I thought you ever could be 'there,' Ann, it's nothing to say that I'd die to save you from it."

She let her thought dwell for a moment upon the picture of herself as a drunkard which had caused such intense feeling in him. "I am not worth his caring what becomes of me in that way," she thought to herself. It was the first time it ever occurred to her to think that she was unworthy of the love he had for her; but at the same moment she felt a shadow extinguish the rays of hope she had begun to feel, for she believed, as Bart did, that his piety was in direct opposition to the help he might otherwise give her. She had begun to hope that piety had loosened its grasp upon him for the time.

"I don't know what's to become of us, Christa and me," she said despairingly; "if we don't take to drink it will be a wonder, everybody turning the cold shoulder on us."

This was not her true thought at all. She knew herself to be quite incapable of the future she suggested, but the theme was excellently adapted to work upon his feelings.

"I'm going away to-night, Ann," he said; "perhaps I won't see you again for a long time; but you know all that you said you would promise last night----"

Her heart began to beat so sharply against her side with sudden hope, and perhaps another feeling to which she gave no name, that her answer was breathless. "Yes," she said eagerly, "if----"

He went on gravely: "I am going to start to-night in a row-boat for The Mills. You can tell me where your father is, and on my way I'll do all I can to help him to get away. It won't be much use perhaps. It is most likely that he will only get away from this locality to be arrested in another, but all that one man can do to help him I will do; but you'll have to give me the promise first, and I'll trust you to keep it."

Ann said nothing. The immediate weight of agonised care for her father's life was lifted off her; but she had a strange feeling that the man who had taken her responsibility had taken upon him its suffering too in a deeper sense than she could understand. It flashed across her, not clearly but indistinctly, that the chief element in her suffering had been the shame of defying law and propriety rather than let her father undergo a just penalty. In some way or other this had been all transferred to Bart, and in the glimmering understanding of his character which was growing within her, she perceived that he had it in him to suffer under it far more intensely than she had suffered. It was very strange that just when she obtained the promise she wanted from him she would have been glad to set him free from it!

Within certain self-pleasing limits Ann had always been a good-natured and generous person, and she experienced a strong impulse of this good nature and generosity just now, but it was only for a moment, and she stifled it as a thing that was quite absurd. Her father must be relieved, of course, from his horrid situation; and, after all, Bart could help him quite easily, more easily than any other man in the world could, and then come back and go on with his life as before. Questions of conscience had never, so far, clouded Ann's mental horizon. A moment's effort to regain her habitual standpoint made it quite clear to her that in this case it was she, she and Christa, who were making the sacrifice; a minute more, and she could almost have found it in her heart to grumble at the condition of the vow which she had so liberally sketched the night before, and only the fact that there was something about Bart which she did not at all understand, and a fear that that something might be a propensity to withdraw from his engagement, made her submissively adhere to it.

"Christa and I will sign the pledge. We will give up dancing and wearing finery. We will stop being friends with worldly people, and we will go to church and meetings, and try to like them." Ann repeated her vow.

Bart took the pen and ink with which she chronicled her sales of beer and wrote the vow twice on two pages of his note-book; at the bottom he added, "G.o.d helping me." Ann signed them both, he keeping one and giving her the other.

This contract on Ann's part had many of the elements of faith in it--a wonderful audacity of faith in her own power to revolutionise her life and control her sister's, and all the unreasoning child-likeness of faith which could launch itself boldly into an unknown future without any knowledge of what life would be like there.

On the part of Toyner the contract showed the power that certain habits of thought, although exercised only for a few months, had over him. Good people are fond of talk about the weakness of good habits compared with the strength of bad ones. But, given the same time to the formation of each, the habits which a man counts good must be stronger than those which he counts evil, because the inner belief of his mind is in unity with them. Toyner believed to-night that he was in open revolt against a rule of life which he had found himself unable to adhere to, and against the G.o.d who had ordained it; but, all the same, it was this rule, and faith in the G.o.d which he had approached by means of it, that actuated him during this conference with Ann. As a man who had given up hope for himself might desire salvation for his child, so he gravely and gently set her feet in what he was accustomed to regard as the path of life before he himself left it.

CHAPTER IX.

Ann's plan of the way in which Toyner more than any other man could aid her father was simple enough. He who was known to be in pursuit of Markham was to take him as a friend through the town at The Mills and start him on the road at the other side. Markham was little known at The Mills, and no one would be likely to take the companion of the constable to be the criminal for whose arrest he had been making so much agitation; they were to travel at the early hour of dawn when few were stirring. This plan, with such modifications as his own good sense suggested, Toyner was willing to adopt.

He started earlier in the evening than she had done, having no particular desire for secrecy. He told his friends that he was going to row to The Mills by night, and those who heard him supposed that he had gained some information concerning Markham that he thought it best to report. It was a calm night; the smoke of distant burning was still in the air.

He dropped down the river in the dark hours before the moonrise, and began to row with strength, as Ann had done, when he reached the placid water. His boat was light and well built. He could see few yards of dark water in advance; he could see the dark outline of the trees. The water was deep; there were no rocks, no hidden banks; he did not make all the haste he could, but rowed on meditatively--he was always more or less attracted by solitude. To-night the mechanical exercise, the darkness, the absolute loneliness, were greater rest to him than sleep would have been. In a despairing dull sort of way he was praying all the time; his mind had contracted a habit of prayer, at least if expressing his thoughts to the divine Being in the belief that they were heard may be called prayer.

Probably no one so old or so wise but that he will behave childishly if he can but feel himself exactly in the same relation to a superior being that a child feels to a grown man. Toyner expressed his grievance over and over again with childlike simplicity; he explained to G.o.d that he could not feel it to be right or fair that, when he had prayed so very much, and prayers of the sort to which a blessing was promised, he should be given over to the d.a.m.ning power of circ.u.mstance, launched in a career of back-sliding, and made thereby, not only an object of greater scorn to all men than if he had never reformed, but actually, as it appeared to him, more worthy of scorn.

He did not expect his complaints to be approved by the Deity, and gained therefore no satisfying sense that the prayer had ascended to heaven.

The moon arose, the night was very warm; into the aromatic haze a mist was arising from the water on all sides. It was not so thick but that he could see his path through it in the darkness; but when the light came he found a thin film of vapour between him and everything at which he looked. The light upon it was so great that it seemed to be luminous in itself, and it had a slightly magnifying power, so that distances looked greater, objects looked larger, and the wild desolate scene with which he was familiar had an aspect that was awful because so unfamiliar.

When Toyner realised what the full effect of the moonlight was going to be, he dropped his oars and sat still for a few minutes, wondering if he would be able to find the landmarks that were necessary, so strange did the landscape look, so wonderful and gigantic were the shapes which the dead trees a.s.sumed. Then he continued his path, looking for a tree that was black and blasted by lightning. He was obliged to grope his way close to the trees; thus his boat b.u.mped once or twice on hidden stumps.

It occurred to him to think what a very lonely place it would be to die in, and a premonition that he was going to die came across him.

Having found the blasted tree, he counted four fallen trees; they came at intervals in the outer row of standing ones; then there was a break in the forest, and he turned his boat into it and paused to listen.

The sound that met his ear--almost the strangest sound that could have been heard in that place--was that of human speech; it was still some distance away, but he heard a voice raised in angry excitement, supplicating, threatening, defying, and complaining.

Toyner began to row down the untried water-way which was opened to his boat. The idea that any one had found Markham in such a place and at such an hour was too extraordinary to be credited. Toyner looked eagerly into the mist. He could see nothing but queer-shaped gulfs of light between trunks and branches. Again his boat rubbed unexpectedly against a stump, and again the strange premonition of approaching death came over him. For a moment he thought that his wisest course would be to return. Then he decided to go forward; but before obeying this command, his mind gave one of those sudden self-attentive flashes the capacity for which marks off the mind of the reflective type from others. He saw himself as he sat there, his whole appearance and dress; he took in his history, and the place to which that hour had brought him, he, Bart Toyner, a thin, somewhat drooping, middle-aged man, unsuccessful, because of his self-indulgence, in all that he had attempted, yet having carried about with him always high desires, which had never had the slightest realisation except in the one clear shining s.p.a.ce of vision and victory which had been his for a few months and now was gone. The light had mocked him; now perhaps he was going to die!

He pushed his boat on, his sensations melting into an excited blank of thought in which curiosity was alone apparent. He was growing strangely excited after his long calm despondency; no doubt the excitement of the other, who was shouting and jabbering not far away in the moonlit night, affected him.

He found his way through the trees of the opening; evidently the splash of his oar was caught by the owner of the noisy voice, for before he could see any one a silence succeeded to the noise, a sudden absolute silence, in itself shocking.

"Are you there, Markham?" cried Toyner.

No answer.

Toyner peered into the silver mist on all sides of him; the sensation of the diffused moonlight was almost dazzling, the trees looked far away, large and unreal. At length among them he saw the great log that had fallen almost horizontal with the water; upon it a solitary human figure stood erect in an att.i.tude of frenzied defiance.

"I have come from your daughter, Markham." Then in a moment, by way of self-explanation, he said, "Toyner."

The man addressed only flung a clenched fist into the air. The silence of his pantomime now that there was some one to speak to was made ghastly by the harangue which he had been pouring out upon the solitude.

"Have you lost your head?" asked Toyner. "I have come from your daughter--I'm not going to arrest you, but set you down at The Mills--you can go where you will then."

He knew now the answer to his first question. The man before him was in some stage of delirium. Toyner wondered if any one could secretly have brought him drink.

There was nothing to be done but to soothe as best he could the other's fear and enmity, and to bring the boat close to the tree for him to get in it. Whether he was sane or mad, it was clearly necessary to take him from that place. Markham retained a sullen silence, but seemed to understand so far that he ceased all threatening gestures. His only movements were certain turnings and sudden crouchings as if he saw or felt enemies about him in the air.

"Now, get in," said Toyner. He had secured the boat. He pulled the other by the legs, and guided him as he slipped from his low bench. "Sit down; you can't stand, you know."

But Markham showed himself able to keep his balance, and alert to help in pushing off the boat. There was a heavy boat-pole ready for use in shallow water, and Markham for a minute handled it adroitly, pushing off from his tree.

Toyner turned his head perforce to see that the boat was not proceeding towards some other dangerous obstacle. Then Markham, with the sudden swift cunning of madness, lifted the b.u.t.t end of his pole and struck him on the head.

Toyner sank beneath the blow as an ox shivers and sinks under the well-aimed blow of the butcher.

Markham looked about him for a moment with an air of childish triumph, looked not alone at the form of the fallen man before him, but all around in the air, as if he had triumphed not over one, but over many.

No eye was there to see the look of fiendish revenge that flitted next over the nervous working of his face. Then he fell quickly to work changing garments with the limp helpless body lying in the bottom of the boat. With unnatural strength he lifted Toyner, dressed in his own coat and hat, to the horizontal log on which he had lived for so long. He took the long mesh of woollen sheeting that his daughter had brought to be a rest and support to his own body, and with it he tied Toyner to the upright tree against which the log was lying; then, with an additional touch of fiendish satire, he took a bit of dry bread out of the ample bag of food which Ann had hung there for his own needs, and laid it on Toyner's knees. Having done all this he pushed his boat away with reckless rapidity, and rowed it back into the open water, steering with that unerring speed by which a somnambulist is often seen to perform a dangerous feat.

The moonlit mist and the silence of night closed around this lonely nook in the dead forest and Toyner's form sitting upon the fallen log. In the open river, where no line determined the meeting of the placid moonlit water and the still, moonlit mist, the boat dashed like a dark streak up the white winding Ahwewee toward the green forest around Fentown Falls. The small dark figure of the man within it was working at his oars with a strength and regularity of some powerful automaton. At every stroke the prow shot forward, and the sound of the splashing oars made soft echoes far and wide.

CHAPTER X.