Hugh sat in his great carved chair, his hands laid out across the bulky arms, his head bent forward a little so that his eyes encompassed all the restless beauty of the fire. After nightfall, when the wind began to shake the cabin, he had built up the fire, and its light now fought ruddily against the whiteness of the moon. Hugh had not lighted his lamp, nor let Bella light it, but he told her to make some strong coffee and keep it hot on the stove. “When Sylvie comes in,” he had said, “she’ll be exhausted. We’ll give her a hot drink and send her to bed, eh, Bella! The foolish child!” This had been said softly, but with a wild, half-vacant look which Bella could not meet.
It was her belief that Pete and Sylvie had gone, not to return that night or any other night. In a desperate, still fashion she guarded this flaming conviction, peering up from long contemplations of it to learn whether there flickered any light of torment on Hugh’s face. But all day, after the queer blankness of face and eyes with which he had first received her news of Sylvie’s disappearance, he had been alternately gay and tranquil. All morning he had mended his boat, and in the afternoon he had cleaned his gun; and whenever he could cajole Bella into being his audience, he had talked. His talk was all of Sylvie, of her pretty childishness, her sweet, wayward ways, of her shyness, her timidity; and later, when supper was cleared away and he had throned himself in the center of that familiar circle of firelight, he had dropped his beautiful voice to a lower key and had boasted of Sylvie’s love for him.
Bella sat on a big log sawed to the height of a low stool. She sat with her face bent down between her hands as though she were saving her eyes from the fire, but those bright, devoted eyes never left Hugh’s face, though sometimes they made of it but a blurred image set in the broken crystals of her tears.
Thus, together, they heard the first rumble of the storm and saw the white squares of moonlight wiped from the floor as with a dark cloth. Next, the windows seemed to jump at them and jump away. “Lightning!” said Hugh. “She’ll be afraid! Will Pete be able to comfort her? Will he, Bella?” Then, because she took courage to look into his face, she saw that his heart had been burnt all day, but that his faith, stronger than his fear, had kept the flame smothered, almost below his consciousness.
While the storm raged across their roof, beat a brutal tattoo close above their deafened heads, pushed at the door, drove a pool of water under the threshold, Hugh walked up and down, to and fro, from fire to window, from door to wall, but not fast, rather with a sort of stateliness. Sometimes he looked sidelong at Bella’s expressionless, listening face. At last he forced himself back to the chair and sat there, mechanically polishing the barrel of his gun, but his tongue still spoke the saga of illusion. It stopped when the storm dropped into the bottomless silence of dawn. Then there was only the dripping from their eaves. Hugh sat there, very white, his gun laid across his lap. Bella, as white, lifted her face.
“They’re coming,” she whispered, and got stiffly to her feet.
Hugh moved back into his chair, turning sidewise and gathering himself as though for a spring. His nervous hands clutched at his gun. Upon the silence the door opened, and Pete and Sylvie came into the room. Wet and storm-beaten and beautiful they were, with scarlet cheeks.
Pete came quickly over to Hugh’s chair; he let fall his pack and gazed resolutely down at his brother’s face.
“Sylvie had a fancy to come with me to the trading-station,” he said. “She came out after me and didn’t overtake me until just where the trail comes out into the road. We hurried back, but the storm caught us. It was pitch-black in the woods; we couldn’t keep the trail. We had to wait for daylight. I hope you weren’t too anxious about her, Hugh.—Bella”—he glanced over his shoulder—“could you make us some hot coffee and help Sylvie into some dry clothes? We are properly drenched, both of us.”
This speaker of terse, authoritative sentences was not the boy that had gone out that morning. That boy was gone forever.
Hugh stood up and looked slowly from Sylvie, who had stayed near the door and held her head up like a queen, to Pete.
“Where were you,” he asked gently—“where were you while it stormed?”
Pete moved toward the fire, holding out his hands. “Ugh!” he shivered, “I’m numb with cold.”
“Where were you,” Hugh repeated, “during the storm?”
Pete lifted his eyes slowly. They were bluer than the blue heart of a sapphire. “Under a pine-tree,” he answered casually enough, and then, just as Hugh would have smiled, the color creeping up into his lips, Pete’s young and honest blood poured over his forehead, engulfing him, blazing the truth across his face. Bella saw it and clenched her hands. Sylvie’s cheeks, too, caught fire. Hugh turned from him, blinded by terror, saw Sylvie’s trembling mouth in her dyed countenance, and turned back. He lifted the hand that had held, all this while, to the chair, and balled it into a fist.
“Don’t strike him,” said Sylvie quietly, not moving from her place by the door. “Don’t ever strike him again—Ham Rutherford!”
Hugh’s bones seemed to crumble; his knees bent; he leaned back against the chair, holding to it behind him with both hands. The gun clattered to the floor. In the silence Sylvie walked across the room and lifted her face. As if for the first time they saw her eyes, black and brilliant and young, sharpening the softness of her features. She looked at Hugh mercilessly, pitilessly.
“I’ve been able to see you for a long time now, Ham Rutherford,” she said. “And the instant I first saw you, I knew your name. Ever since the night you told me that story about the river, I’ve been watching you. You are a great and infamous liar! Yes, I know that you once killed a man for telling you that. Kill me if you like, for I am going to repeat it after him—a liar, hideous and deformed outside and in. I have no pity for a liar. Not even your physical misfortune shall shield you! You have made too great a mockery of it. You brought me here, blind, as helpless as one of the things you catch in your traps, and you played the hero with me. And you fed me with lies and lies and lies. I’ve eaten and drunk them until I’m sick. Now stand up and look at the truth. You are to eat that until you are sick.—No, Bella; no, Pete; I’m going to speak; no one can stop me. I know you love him. How you can look at him and see him as he is and know what he has done and still love him, I can’t understand. Now, Hugh Garth—the name you tried to make me love you by—I’ll tell these people that love you, some of the beautiful fables with which you tried to win my love. Maybe, then, they will begin to see you as you are. Here is the first: ‘There was once a very noble youth who had a friend—‘”
“Don’t!” Hugh groaned pitifully, his head bent before her.
“Perhaps I won’t; after all, it’s not interesting unless you’re fool enough, or blind enough, to be tricked into fancying it’s the truth. But let me tell them some of the other things. This noble youth, this man sacrificed his life for his friend and bore the blame of that friend’s guilt. He is as handsome as a Viking, the very ideal of a girl’s imagination, strong and shapely and graceful. Has he a humped shoulder and a lame leg and a scarred face revealing his scarred soul? Answer me.”
Hugh flinched as though under a lash.
Pete put out his hand uncertainly; his face was drawn with pain. “Sylvie—stop. You must stop. You’re too cruel. He did lie to you, but remember, that was because he—”
The brilliant black eyes flashed back at him.
“Because he loved me, you were going to say? When you love a woman, do you try to ruin her life? Do you creep up in the dark under cover of her blindness and touch her with some dreadful, poisonous wound? You don’t know my horror of that man, Pete. Oh, he kissed—kissed me!” She shivered. “A murderer! Yes, a murderer. Oh, Ham Rutherford, if I could only make you see yourself! If I could give you my eyes when they opened, and I saw Pete’s beauty and Bella’s sweetness and the horrible ugliness of you! And then, day by day—you see, I was afraid to let you know that I had seen you. I was in terror of you, of what you might do to me. I was afraid of you all; you had all deceived me. Day by day I learned the utter distortion of you, mind, body, and soul. How could I help but—but—” She faltered and half turned to Pete, holding out her hands. Her indignation at the treachery practiced upon her, an anger that had grown in silence to unbearable heat, had spent itself in words. She was all for consolation now—for sympathy. But Pete stepped back from her. He was looking at Hugh, and his clear, young face was an open wound.
Hugh pushed himself up and slowly lifted his face. It was then that he saw Sylvie’s hands stretched out to Pete. He started—no one knew what the convulsive movement meant; but as he started—the gun tripped him. He caught it up carelessly, blindly. There was a flash—a crash. Pete leaped and bent, holding his arm. Blood spurted between his fingers, soaking his wet sleeve; and Sylvie, crying aloud, wrapped him in trembling, protective arms.
“I’m not much hurt,” he said half dazedly. “It—it was an accident. He didn’t mean it. I was looking at him. The gun went off. He didn’t shoot at me.... Hugh!”
The man was staring straight ahead of him, and now he drew his hand across his eyes, the fingers crooked as though they tore a veil.
“Now,” he said, “I do see myself just as I am. Yes, I did shoot at you. Yes, I think I meant to kill you. I must have meant to kill you. That’s the truth. For the second time I’m a murderer. Yet now, as God lives, even if I am down in the dust, I’ll lay hold of my stars. I’m going to walk out of your lives so that they can shape themselves to their own good ends. Sylvie can shape yours with you, Pete.” He hesitated a moment. “If a coward, a murderer, can say ‘God bless you,’ take that blessing!”
He picked up his gun and shuffled across the floor, flinching aside from Bella as though he could bear no further touch or word, and went out of the door, letting in the brightness of the sunrise.
Pete had sunk into a chair, faint from the shock and weakness of his wound; and Sylvie bent over him. For a minute, in great and bitter loneliness Bella stood and watched them; then she followed Hugh.
He had put down his gun and gone slowly up from the hollow and was walking along the river-bank. He had the look of a man who strolls in meditation. When he came to his boat where it lay near the roots of the three big pines, he turned it over—he had been mending its bottom the morning of yesterday—and began to push it down toward the plunging stream. The glitter of morning took all the swirlings and ripplings and plungings of the swift water in its golden hands. Hugh steadied the boat. Above him on the bank Bella spoke quietly.
“Hugh,” she said, “look up at me. What are you going to do?”
He lifted his face, still holding to the boat.
“What are you going to do?” she repeated.
“Why do you want to know? You’ve heard the truth.”
She came down the bank and stood beside him so close that her hair, loosened by the wind, was blown against his shoulder. She pressed it back and gazed into his eyes. The inner glow had worn through at last. She was all warmth, all flame now. She smiled with soft and parted lips. “Do you think that was the truth of you, my dear,” she said, “my truth of you? I have always seen you as you are. But”—she drew a big breath, like a climber who has reached the height—“but—I came to you, didn’t I?”
Hugh’s eyes widened, the pupils swallowing her light. “You—you came to me? Not for Pete’s sake?”
“Never for his sake.”
“But, Bella—you laughed at me.”
“Yes, once, for your poor folly in trying to be what you are not. When have I ever laughed at what you are? It’s what you are I’ve loved, my dear, just what you are—a tormented child. Only be honest with me, Hugh. Tell me what do you want: the moon now or—or all the truth?”
“I want the truth—and the end,” he said. “I’m going down the river.”
She glanced at the flood as though it were a brook. “I am going with you then. You must take me. My life has always been yours.”
He laid one of his hands on either of her cheeks so that her face was framed for him to read. It was flushed; the deep eyes were beautiful.
“You—all these empty years! You, Bella.” It was as though he saw her now for the first time. The revelation dazzled him. “I’ve gone thirsty, with wine at my elbow, until it’s too late.” He shook his shoulders. “Come with me, then, if you must.”
She stepped into the boat and sat in the stern, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes in their great and sudden beauty still fixed on his face. The wind blew her hair wildly in a long, streaming veil across her forehead, down her cheek, out over her shoulder. She was beautiful with the joy that was hers at last.
Hugh stepped in and stood to push the boat out from the shore. His eyes never left hers. It was a deep, long look of which her soul drank, quenching its thirst. Very slowly the boat moved; then it turned. A hand seemed to grip it’s prow. There was a mighty, confused roaring in their ears; the bank seemed to be snatched back from them. The sunlight, shone into Hugh’s face. Suddenly he caught at his oar.
“The river is not so high,” he shouted; “the flood’s going down.” He looked away from her and back. “We have—just a chance. We’ll leave it to the river. It may be the end of you and me—or, Bella, it may be the beginning.”
He steadied the boat with all his skill. It was drawn with frightful swiftness down the swollen stream.
Before noon Sylvie and Pete moved slowly across the open space and went back along their forest trail. They walked like lovers, and Sylvie’s arm helped to support him. Just before he stepped in among the trees he turned for a long, desolate, backward look.
Now the hoop of green, once white as paper under the noon sun, and the level, circular rim of the forest are empty and silent except for the rattling of the river and the moving of the pines against the fixed, grave stars. The human tragedy—or was it comedy?—has burnt itself out like the embers of a camp-fire that will never again be kindled in that lonely spot.
THE END
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