Snow-Blind

CHAPTER II

Pete blinked, swallowed hard and began to talk fast and hopefully.

“He’ll come back. I don’t believe he’ll get halfway there, Bella,” he reassured the woman. “He’ll come to his senses. You know how moody he is. Come over here and doctor up my ankle, please. ‘Make a fuss over me, Bell.’ Isn’t that what I used to say?”

He coaxed until at last she came and knelt before him and removed his moccasin and heavy woolen sock. The strong white foot was like marble, but the ankle was swollen and discolored. Bella clicked her tongue. “He is a brute, you know!” She laughed shortly. Since Garth’s departure she had become almost a human being. The deaf-mute look had melted from her, and a sardonic humor emerged; her eyes cleared; she could even smile. “Why do we care so much for him, Pete—the two of us?”

Pete winced under her touch and puckered his brows. “Because he’s such a kid, I guess. He’s always fretting after the moon.”

“Don’t you ever get angry with him, Pete? He does treat you shameful sometimes.”

“N-no. Not often. He’s always sorry and ashamed afterward. He’d like to be as kind as God. I believe if he could only fool us into thinking he was God, he could act like Him—ouch, Bella! Go easy.”

“You’re an awful smart boy, Pete. It’s a sin you’ve never had any schooling.”

“Schooling! Gosh! I’ve had all the schooling I could digest. Hugh beat it into me. He’s taught me all he had in his head and a whole lot he never ought to have had there, I guess. But you’ve taught me most, Bella—that’s the truth of it.”

“Me! I never knew anything. They saw to that. They never did anything for me at home but abuse me. Hugh Garth was the only relation I ever had in the world that spoke kind to me. Remember how I used to run over from my folks to tuck you into bed in your little room above the shop, Pete? No, you were too little.”

“Of course, I remember,” the boy replied. “The ankle’s fine now, Bella. Let up. I can’t stand that rubbing. Let me stick the foot up on another chair. There—that’s great. It doesn’t hurt near so bad now. I remember Hugh’s bookshop; yes, I do—honest! I remember sitting on the ladder and listening to him talk to the students when they came in. He always was a gorgeous talker, Bella. They used to stand around and listen to his yarns like kids to a fairy story. Just the same as you and I do now—when we can get him into a good humor. But, you know, he used to like strangers best—to talk to, I mean.”

Bella assented, bitterly. She had begun to clear the table of its almost untouched meal. “Because he could put it over better with a stranger. It isn’t the truth Hugh likes—about himself, or others.”

Pete had begun to whittle a piece of wood. He was a charming figure, slouching down in his chair, slim and graceful, his shapely golden head ruffled, his chin pressed against his chest. His expression was indescribably sweet and boyish, the shadow of anxiety and pain accentuating a wistful if determined cheerfulness. He was deliberately entertaining Bella, diverting her mind from its agony of apprehension. She saw through him, but like a sick child she took the entertainment languidly.

“Now, you’re too dead bent on the truth, Bella. You know you are. You’re a regular bear for the truth.”

“I can’t see anything else,” she said gloomily. “Things are just so to me—no blinking them.”

He put his head a little to one side and contemplated her. “What do you see when you look into the water-bucket, Bella?”

“The water-bucket?” She flushed. “Just because you caught me prinking that once!”

“Well, if you had a mirror, what would you see in it, then?”

“An ugly old woman, Pete.”

“There! Your mind’s just the wrong-side-out of Hugh’s. He won’t see himself ugly, and you won’t see yourself pretty. I’m the only sane fellow in this house.”

“And you never in your life saw a pretty woman to remember her. Besides, you’re too young.” She said it with a tart sweetness and vanished into the kitchen.

With her departure Pete’s whittling ceased, his hands fell slack and he began to stare out through the snow-walled window. His anxiety for Hugh slipped imperceptibly into a vague pondering over his own youthfulness. That’s what those two were always telling him, sometimes savagely, sometimes tenderly! “You’re too young.” What did it mean to him, anyhow, that he was “too young”? A desolation from which at times he suffered in secret overcame him.

He was twenty-one or -two—or his memory lied. They had never celebrated his birthdays, but he was five or six years old when Hugh had been so suddenly, so unexplainably taken from the house, back there in the little Eastern college town where they had lived. It was a few months later that Bella—Cousin Bella, who worked at “the farm”—came for him, a furtive, desperate Bella with a bruised face—a Bella tight-strung for flight, for a breaking of the galling accustomed ties of her life, for a terrible plunge into unknown adventure. She had muttered to him, as she dressed him and bundled together a few of his belongings, that they “were going to Hugh”—only it was another name she used, a name since blotted from their lives.

Hugh had sent for them. She was the only person in the world that Hugh could trust. But no one must know where they were going. They must be away by the time the man who took charge of the shop came back in the morning.

Pete remembered the journey. He remembered the small frontier station where they left the train at last. He remembered that strange, far-flung horizon, streaked with dawn, and his first taste of the tangy, heady air. There had been a long, long drive and a parting with the friendly driver where Bella turned on to the trail through the woods. It had been dim and dark and terrible among the endless regiments of trees—mazy and green and altogether bewildering. And after vague hop-o’-my-thumb wanderings, he had a disconnected memory of Hugh—a wild, rugged, ragged, bearded Hugh who caught him up fiercely as though he had an ogrish hunger for the feel of little boys. It was night when they came to Hugh’s hiding-place. For miles Pete had been carried in his brother’s arms. Bella had limped behind them. There had been a ford, he remembered; the splashing water had roused Pete, and he stayed awake afterward until he found himself before a dancing fire of logs in a queer, dark, resinous-smelling house, very low, with unglazed windows. He remembered, too, that Bella had burst out crying. That was the queerest memory of them all—that crying of Bella’s.—Even now he could not understand exactly why she had cried so then.

The frightened, furtive life they had all led since—the life of scared wild things—had left its mark on Pete. His fear for Hugh now threw him back into the half-forgotten state of apprehension which had been the atmosphere of all his little boyhood. He had not known then why strange men were creatures to be feared and shunned. In fact, he had never been told the reason for Hugh’s flight. Only, bit by bit, he had pieced together hints and vague allusions until he knew that this strange, embittered, boasting poet of a brother had killed or had been accused of killing. In his loyal boy mind Hugh Garth was promptly acquitted. It was the world that was wrong—not Hugh. Yet to-day, after all the long years of carefulness, he had gone back to the cruelty of the world.

Like a beast the boy’s anxiety for his brother began to prowl about the walls of his mind. He imagined Hugh appearing at the trading-station. He pictured the curious glances of the Indians and the white natives. This limping, extravagant, energetic Hugh with his whitening hair and eyebrows and flaring hazel eyes—with his crooked nose and mouth, his magnificently desperate manner and his magnificently desperate voice—attention would inevitably fasten upon him anywhere; how much more in an empty land such as this! Pete fancied the inquiring looks turned from the man to the man’s posted picture. It was no longer a faithful likeness, of course; still, it was a likeness. There was no other man in all the world like Hugh! He was made of odd, fantastic fragments, of ill-fitting parts—physically, mentally, spiritually. It was as if a soul had seen itself in a crooked mirror and had fashioned a form to match the distorted image. Hugh wouldn’t, couldn’t force himself to be inconspicuous. He would swagger; he would talk loud; his big, beautiful voice would challenge attention, create an audience. He would have some impossible, splendid tale to tell.

Pete sat up straighter in his chair, gingerly rearranging the ankle, and lifted his blue and haunted eyes—the eyes of the North—to the window.

The dazzle of noon had faded to a glow. The short winter day was nearly done. There would be a long violet twilight, and then, the blaze of stars.

But for his aching ankle Pete would be sliding out on soundless skis, now poised for breathless flight down some long slope, now leaping fallen trees or buried ditches. He spent half of his wild young restlessness in such long night runs when, in a sort of ecstasy, he outraced the stifled longings of his exiled youth. But there would be no ski-running for several nights now. He was a prisoner, and at a time when imprisonment was hard to bear.

If only there were some way of getting quick news of Hugh! Why had Bella and he let this thing happen? Why had they stood helplessly by and allowed the rash fool to go singing to his own destruction? They might have held him by force, if not by argument, long enough to bring him to his senses. They had been weak; they were always weak before Hugh’s magnetic strength—always the audience, the following; Bella, for all her devastating tongue, no less than himself. And Hugh’s liberty, perhaps his life, might be the price of their acquiescence.

Straining forward in his chair, listening, there came to Pete, across the silence, the sound of skis.

He rose and hopped to the door, flinging it wide. He could not see above the top of the drift which rose just beyond the roof to a height of nine or ten feet, but listening intently, he thought he recognized a familiar slight unevenness in the sliding of the skis.

“Bella!” he shouted, his boy-voice ringing with relief. “Bella! Here’s Hugh. He’s come back.”

Bella was instantly at his side. They stood waiting in the doorway. Against the violet sky darkening above the blue wall of snow, a bulky figure rose, blotting out the light. It half slid, half tumbled down upon them, clumsy and shapeless.

“Let us in,” panted Hugh. “Let us in.”

Slipping his feet from the straps of his skis, he staggered past them and they saw that he was carrying a woman in his arms.