They arrived in Asheville the night before Christmas Eve. Jim listened to his wife's prattle about the wonderful views with quiet indifference.
They stopped at the Battery Park Hotel, and she hoped the waning moon would give them at least a glimpse of the beautiful valley of the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers and the dark, towering ranges of mountains among the stars. She made Jim wait on the balcony of the room for half an hour, but the clouds grew denser and he persisted in nodding.
His head dipped lower than usual, and she laughed.
“Poor old sleepy-head!”
“For the love o' Mike, Kiddo—me for the hay. Won't them mountains wait till morning?”
“All right!” she answered cheerily. “I'll pull you out at sunrise. The sunrise from our window will be glorious.”
He rose and stretched his body like a young, well fed tiger.
“I think it's prettier from the bed. But have it your own way—have it your own way. I'll agree to anything if you lemme go to sleep now.”
She rose as the first gray fires of dawn began to warm the cloud-banks on the eastern horizon, stood beside her window and watched in silent ecstasy. Jim was sleeping heavily. She would not wake him until the glory of the sunrise was at its height. She loved to watch the changing lights and shadows in sky and valley and on distant mountain peaks as the light slowly filtered over the eastern hills.
She had recovered from the depression of the last days of their camp. The journey back into the world had improved Jim's manners. There could be no doubt about his ambitions. His determination to be a millionaire was the lever she now meant to work in raising his social aspirations.
Why should she feel depressed?
Their married life had just begun. The two weeks they had passed on their honeymoon had been happy beyond her dreams of happiness. Somehow her imagination had failed to give any conception of the wonder and glory of this revelation of life. His little lapses of selfishness on their sand island no doubt came from ignorance of what was expected of him.
For one thing she felt especially thankful. There had been no ugly confessions of a shady past to cloud the joy of their love. Her lover might be ignorant of the ways of polite society. He was equally free of its sinister vices. She thanked God for that. The soul of the man she had married was clean of all memories of women. The love he gave was fierce in its unrestrained passion—but it was all hers. She gloried in its strength.
She made up her mind, standing there in the soft light of the dawn, that she would bend his iron will to her own in the growing, sweet intimacy of their married life and threw her fears to the winds.
The thin, fleecy clouds that hung over the low range of the eastern foreground were all aglow now, with every tint of the rainbow, while the sun's bed beyond the hills was flaming in scarlet and gold.
She clapped her hands in ecstasy.
“Jim! Jim, dear!”
He made no response, and she rushed to his side and whispered:
“You must see this sunrise—get up quick, quick, dear. It's wonderful.”
“What's the matter?” he muttered.
“The sunrise over the mountains—quick—it's glorious.”
His heavy eyelids drooped and closed. He dropped on the pillow and buried his face out of sight.
“Ah, Jim dear, do come—just to please me.”
“I'm dead, Kiddo—dead to the world,” he sighed. “Don't like to see the sun rise. I never did. Come on back and let's sleep——”
His last words were barely audible. He was breathing heavily as his lips ceased to move.
She gave it up, returned to the window and watched the changing colors until the white light from the sun's face had touched with life the last shadows of the valleys and flashed its signals from the farthest towering peaks.
Her whole being quivered in response to the beauty of this glorious mountain world. The air was wine. She loved the sapphire skies and the warm, lazy, caressing touch of the sun of the South.
A sense of bitterness came, just for a moment, that the man she had chosen for her mate had no eye to see these wonders and no ear to hear their music. During the madness of his whirlwind courtship she had gotten the impression that his spirit was sensitive to beauty—to the waters of the bay, the sea and the wooded hills. She must face the facts. Their stay on the island had convinced her that he had eyes only for her. She must make the most of it.
It was ten o'clock before Jim could be persuaded to rise and get breakfast. She literally pulled him up the stairs to the observatory on the tower of the hotel.
“What's the game, Kiddo? What's the game?” he grumbled.
“Ask me no questions. But do just as I tell you; come on!”
Her face was radiant, her hair in a tangle of riotous beauty about her forehead and temples, her eyes sparkling.
“Don't look till I tell you!” she cried, as they emerged on the little minaret which crowns the tower.
“Now open and see the glory of the Lord!” she cried with joyous awe.
The day was one of matchless beauty. The clouds that swung low in the early morning had floated higher and higher till they hung now in shining billows above the highest balsam-crowned peaks in the distance.
In every direction, as far as the eye could reach, north, south, east, west, the dark ranges mounted in the azure skies until the farthest dim lines melted into the heavens.
“Oh, Jim dear, isn't it wonderful! We're lucky to get this view on our first day. It's such a good omen.”
Jim opened his eyes lazily and puffed his cigarette in a calm, patronizing way.
“Tough sledding we'd have had with an automobile over those hills,” he said. “We'll try it after lunch, though.”
“We'll go for a ride?” she cried joyfully.
“Yep. Got to hunt up the folks. The mountains near Asheville!” he said with disgust. “I should say they are near—and far, too. Holy smoke, I'll bet we get lost!”
“Nonsense——”
“Where's the Black Mountains, I wonder?” he asked suddenly.
“Over there!” She pointed to the giant peaks projecting here and there in dim, blue waves beyond the Great Craggy Range in the foreground.
“Holy Moses! Do we have to climb those crags before we start?”
“To go to Black Mountain?”
“Yes. That's where the lawyer said they lived, under Cat-tail Peak in the Black Mountain Range—wherever t'ell that is.”
“No, no! You don't climb the Great Craggy; you go around this end of it and follow the Swannanoa River right up to the foot of Mount Mitchell, the highest peak this side of the Rockies. The Cat-tail is just beyond Mount Mitchell.”
“You've been there?” he asked in surprise.
“Once, with a party from Asheville. We spent three days and slept in caves.”
“Suppose you'd know the way now?”
“We couldn't miss it. We follow the bed of the Swannanoa to its source——-”
“Then that settles it. We'll go by ourselves. I don't want any mutt along to show us the way. We couldn't get lost nohow, could we?”
“Of course not—all the roads lead to Asheville. We can ask the way to the house you want, when we reach the little stopping place at the foot of Mount Mitchell.”
“Gee, Kid, you're a wonder!” he exclaimed admiringly. “Couldn't get along without you, now could I?”
“I hope not, sir!”
“You bet I couldn't! We'll start right away. The roads will give us a jolt——”
He turned suddenly to go.
“Wait—wait a minute, dear,” she pleaded. “You haven't seen this gorgeous view to the southwest, with Mount Pisgah looming in the center like some vast cathedral spire—look, isn't it glorious?”
“Fine! Fine!” he responded in quick, businesslike tones.
“You can look for days and weeks and not begin to realize the changing beauty of these mountains, clothed in eternal green! Just think, dear, Mount Pisgah, there, is forty miles away, and it looks as if you could stroll over to it in an hour's walk. And there are twenty-three magnificent peaks like that, all of them more than six thousand feet high——”
She paused with a frown. He was neither looking nor listening. He had fallen into a brown study; his mind was miles away.
“You're not listening, Jim—nor seeing anything,” she said reproachfully.
“No—Kiddo, we must get ready for that trip. I've got a letter for a lawyer downtown. I'll find him and hire a car. I'll be back here for you in an hour. You'll be ready?”
“Right away, in half an hour——”
“Just pack a suit-case for us both. We'll stay one night. I'll take a bag, too, that I have in my trunk.”
It was noon before he returned with a staunch touring car ready for the trip. He opened the little steamer trunk which he had always kept locked and took from it a small leather bag. He placed it on the floor, and, in spite of careful handling, the ring of metal inside could be distinctly heard.
“What on earth have you got in that queer black bag?” she asked in surprise.
“Oh, just a lot o' junk from the shop. I thought I might tinker with it at odd times. I don't want to leave it here. It's got one of my new models in it.”
He carried the bag in his hand, refusing to allow the porter who came for the suit-case to touch it.
He threw the suit-case in the bottom of the tonneau. The bag he stowed carefully under the cushions of the rear seat. The moment he placed his hand on the wheel of the machine, he was at his best. Every trace of the street gamin fell from him. Again he was the eagle-eyed master of time and space. The machine answered his touch with more than human obedience. He knew how to humor its mood. He conserved its power for a hill with unerring accuracy and threw it over the grades with rarely a pause to change his speeds. He could turn the sharp curves with such swift, easy grace that he scarcely caused Mary's body to swerve an inch. He could sense a rough place in the road and glide over it with velvet touch.
A tire blew out, five miles up the stream from Asheville, and the easy, business-like deliberation with which he removed the old and adjusted the new, was a revelation to Mary of a new phase of his character.
He never once grunted, or swore, or lost his poise, or manifested the slightest impatience. He set about his task coolly, carefully, skillfully, and finished it quickly and silently.
His long silences at last began to worry her. An invisible barrier had reared itself between them. The impression was purely mental—but it was none the less real and distressing.
There was a look of aloof absorption about him she had never seen before. At first she attributed it to the dread of meeting his kinsfolk for the first time, his fear of what they might be like or what they might think of him.
He answered her questions cheerfully but mechanically. Sometimes he stared at her in a cold, impersonal way and gave no answer, as if her questions were an impertinence and she were not of sufficient importance to waste his breath on.
Unable at last to endure the strain, she burst out impatiently:
“What on earth's the matter with you, Jim?”
“Why?” he asked softly.
“You haven't spoken to me in half an hour, and I've asked you two questions.”
“Just studying about something, Kiddo, something big. I'll tell you sometime, maybe—not now.”
Slowly a great fear began to shape itself in her heart. The real man behind those slumbering eyes she had never known. Who was he?
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