CHAPTER IX
WORK AND A SONG
On the studio skylight the misty autumn rain fell that night, as the snow fell against Sheila's window-panes, with a light tapping. Below it Dickie worked. He had very little leisure now for stars or dreams. For the first time in his neglected and mismanaged life he knew the pleasure of congenial work; and this, although Lorrimer worked him like a slave. He dragged him over the city and set his picture-painting faculty to labor in dark corners. Dickie, every sense keen and clean, was not allowed to flinch. No, his freshness was his value. And the power that was in him, driven with whip and spur, throve and grew and fairly took the bit in its teeth and ran away with its trainer.
"Look here, my lad," Lorrimer had said that morning, "you keep on laying hands on the English language the way you've been doing lately and I'll have to get a job for you on the staff. Then my plagiarism that has been paying us both so well comes to an end. I won't have the face to edit stuff like this much longer." Lorrimer did not realize in his amazement that Dickie's mind had always busied itself with this exciting and nerve-racking matter of choosing words. From his childhood, in the face of ridicule and outrage, he had fumbled with the tools of Lorrimer's trade. No wonder that now knowledge and practice, and the sort of intensive training he was under, magically fitted all the jumbled odds and ends into place. Dickie had stopped looking over his shoulder. The pursuing pack, the stealthy-footed beasts of the city, had dropped utterly from his flying imagination. There was only one that remained faithful—that craving for beauty—half-god, half-beast. Against him Dickie still pressed his door shut. Lorrimer's gift of work had not quieted the leader of the pack. But it had brought Dickie something that was nearly happiness. The very look of him had changed; he looked driven rather than harried, keen rather than harassed, eager instead of vague, hungry rather than wistful. Only, sometimes, Dickie's brain would suddenly turn blank and blind from sheer exhaustion. This happened to him now. The printed lines he was studying lost all their meaning. He put his forehead on his hands. Then he heard that eerie, light tapping above him on the skylight. But he was too tired to look up.
It was on that very afternoon when Sheila rode down the trail with her flowers tied before her on the saddle, singing to keep up her heart. It was that very afternoon when she had cried out half-consciously for "Dickie—Dickie—Dickie"—and now it was, as though the cry had traveled, that a memory of her leapt upon his mind; a memory of Sheila singing. She had come into the chocolate-colored lobby from one of her rides with Jim Greely. She had held a handful of cactus flowers. She had stopped over there by one of the windows to put them in a glass. And to show Dickie, a prisoner at his desk, that she did not consider his presence—it was during the period of their estrangement—she had sung softly as a girl sings when she knows herself to be alone: a little tender, sad chanting song, that seemed made to fit her mouth. The pain her singing had given him that afternoon had cut a picture of her on Dickie's brain. Just because he had tried so hard not to look at her. Now it jumped out at him against his closed, wet lids. The very motions of her mouth came back, the positive dear curve of her chin, the throat there slim against the light. Hard work had driven her image a little from his mind lately; it returned now to revenge his self-absorption—returned with a song.
Dickie got up and wandered about the room. He tried to hum the air, but his throat contracted. He tried to whistle, but his lips turned stiff. He bent over his book—no use, she still sang. All night he was tormented by that chanting, hurting song. He sobbed with the hurt of it. He tossed about on his bed. He could not but remember how little she had loved him. All at once there came to him a mysterious and beautiful release. It seemed that the cool spirit, detached, winged, drew him to itself or became itself entirely possessed of him. He was taken out of his pain and yet he understood it. And he began suddenly, easily, to put it into words. The misery was ecstasy, the hurt was inspiration, the song sang sweetly as though it had been sung to soothe and not to make him suffer.
"Oh, little song you sang to me"—
Ah, yes, at heart she had been singing to him—
"A hundred, hundred days ago,
Oh, little song, whose melody
Walks in my heart and stumbles so;
I cannot bear the level nights,
And all the days are over-long,
And all the hours from dark to dark
Turn to a little song …"
Dickie, not knowing how he got there, was at his table again. He was writing. He was happy beyond any conception he had ever had of happiness. That there was agony in his happiness only intensified it. The leader of the wolf-pack, beast with a god's face, the noblest of man's desires, that passionate and humble craving for beauty, had him by the throat.
So it was that Dickie wrote his first poem.
CHAPTER X
WINTER
Winter snapped at Hidden Creek as a wolf snaps, but held its grip as a bulldog holds his. There came a few November days when all the air and sky and tree-tops were filled with summer again, but the snow that had poured itself down so steadily in that October storm did not give way. It sank a trifle at noon and covered itself at night with a glare of ice. It was impossible to go anywhere except on snow-shoes. Sheila quickly learned the trick and plodded with bent knees, limber ankles, and wide-apart feet through the winter miracle of the woods. It was another revelation of pure beauty, but her heart was too sore to hold the splendor as it had held the gentler beauty of summer and autumn. Besides, little by little she was aware of a vague, encompassing uneasiness. Since the winter jaws had snapped them in, setting its teeth between them and all other life, Miss Blake had subtly and gradually changed. It was as though her stature had increased, her color deepened. Sometimes to Sheila that square, strong body seemed to fill the world. She was more and more masterful, quicker with her orders, charier of her smiles, shorter of speech and temper. Her eyes seemed to grow redder, the sparks closer to flame, as though the intense cold fanned them.
Once they harnessed the dogs to the sled and rode down the country for the mail. The trip they made together. Sheila sat wrapped in furs in front of the broad figure of her companion, who stood at the back of the sledge, used a long whip, and shouted to the dogs by name in her great musical voice of which the mountain echo made fine use. They sped close to the frozen whiteness of the world, streaked down the slopes, and were drawn soundlessly through the columned vistas of the woods. Here, there, and everywhere were tracks, of coyotes, fox, rabbit, martin, and the little pointed patteran of winter birds, yet they saw nothing living. "What's got the elk and moose this season?" muttered Miss Blake. Nothing stirred except the soft plop of shaken snow or the little flurry of drifting flakes. These frost-flakes lay two inches deep on the surface of the snow, dry and distinct all day in the cold so that they could be blown apart at a breath. Miss Blake was cheerful on this journey. She sang songs, she told brief stories of other sled trips. At the post-office an old, lonely man delivered them some parcels and a vast bagful of magazines. There was a brief passage of arms between him and Miss Blake. She accused him of withholding a box of cartridges, and would not be content till she had poked about his office in dark corners. She came out swearing at the failure of her search. "I needed that shot," she said. "My supply is short. I made sure it'd be here to-day." There were no letters for either of them, and Sheila felt again that queer shiver of her loneliness. But, on the whole, it was a wonderful day, and, under a world of most amazing stars, the small, valiant ranch-house, with its glowing stove and its hot mess of supper, felt like home…. Not long after that came the first stroke of fate.
The little old horse left them and, though they shoed patiently for miles following his track, it was only to find his bones gnawed clean by coyotes or by wolves. Sheila's tears froze to her lashes, but Miss Blake's face went a little pale. She said nothing, and in her steps Sheila plodded home in silence. That evening Miss Blake laid hands on her…. They had washed up their dishes. Sheila was putting a log on the fire. It rolled out of her grasp to the bearskin rug and struck Miss Blake's foot. Before Sheila could even say her quick "I'm sorry," the woman had come at her with a sort of spring, had gripped her by the shoulders, had shaken her with ferocity, and let her go. Sheila fell back, her own hands raised to her bruised shoulders, her eyes phosphorescent in a pale face.
"Miss Blake, how dare you touch me!"
The woman kicked back the log, turned a red face, and laughed.
"Dare! You little silly! What's to scare me of you?"
An awful conviction of helplessness depressed Sheila's heart, but she kept her eyes leveled on Miss Blake's.
"Do you suppose I will stay here with you one hour, if you treat me like this?"
That brought another laugh. But Miss Blake was evidently trying to make light of her outbreak. "Scared you, didn't I?" she said. "I guess you never got much training, eh!"
"I am not a dog," said Sheila shortly.
"Well, if you aren't"—Miss Blake returned to her chair and took up a magazine. She put the spectacles on her nose with shaking hands. "You're my girl, aren't you? You can't expect to get nothing but petting from me, Sheila."
If she had not been icy with rage, Sheila might have smiled at this. "I don't know what you mean, Miss Blake, by my being your girl. I work for you, to be sure. I know that. But I know, too, that you will have to apologize to me for this."
Miss Blake swung one leg across the other and stared above her glasses.
"Apologize to you!"
"Yes. I will allow nobody to touch me."
"Shucks! Go tell that to the marines! You've never been touched, have you? Sweet sixteen!"
Hudson's kiss again scorched Sheila's mouth and her whole body burned.
Miss Blake watched that fire consume her, and again she laughed.
"I'm waiting for you to apologize," said Sheila again, this time between small set teeth.
"Well, my girl, wait. That'll cool you off."
Sheila stood and felt the violent beating of her heart. A log in the wall snapped from the bitter frost.
"Miss Blake," she said presently, a pitiful young quaver in her voice, "if you don't beg my pardon I'll go to-morrow."
Miss Blake flung her book down with a gesture of impatience. "Oh, quit your nonsense, Sheila!" she said. "What's a shaking! You know you can't get out of here. It'd take you a week to get anywhere at all except into a frozen supper for the coyotes. Your beau's left the country—Madder told me at the post-office. Make the best of it, Sheila. Lucky if you don't get worse than that before spring. You'll get used to me in time, get broken in and learn my ways. I'm not half bad, but I've got to be obeyed. I've got to be master. That's me. What do you think I've come 'way out here to the wilderness for, if not because I can't stand anything less than being master? Here I've got my place and my dogs and a world that don't talk back. And now I've got you for company and to do my work. You've got to fall into line, Sheila, right in the ranks. Once, some one out there in the world"—she made a gesture, dropped her chin on her big chest, and looked out under her short, dense, rust-colored eyelashes—"tried to break me. I won't tell you what he got. That's where I quit the ways of women—yes, ma'am, and the ways of men." She stood up and walked over to the window and looked out. The dogs were sleeping in their kennels, but a chain rattled. "I've broke the wolf-pack. You've seen them wriggle on their bellies for me, haven't you? Well, my girl, do you think I can't break you?" She wheeled back and stood with her hands on her hips. It was at that moment that she seemed to fill the world. Her ruddy eyes glowed like blood. They were not quite sane. That was it. Sheila went suddenly weak. They were not quite sane—those red eyes filled with sparks.
The girl stepped back and sat down in her chair. She bent forward, pressed her hands flat together, palm to palm between her knees, and stared fixedly down at them. She made no secret of her desperate preoccupation.
Miss Blake's face softened a little at this withdrawal. She came back to her place and resumed her spectacles.
"I'll tell you why I'm snappy," she said presently. "I'm scared."
This startled Sheila into a look. Miss Blake was moistening her lips. "That horse—you know—the coyotes got him. I guess he went down and they fell upon him. Well, he was to feed the dogs with until I could get my winter meat."
"What do you mean?"
"That's what I buy 'em for. Little old horses, for a couple of bits, and work 'em out and shoot 'em for dog-feed. Well, Sheila, when they're fed, they're dogs. But when they're starved—they're wolves … And I can't think what's come to the elk this year. To-morrow I'll take out my little old gun."
To-morrow and the next day and the next she took her gun and strapped on her shoes and went out for all day long into the cold. Each time she came back more exhausted and more fierce. Sheila would have her supper ready and waiting sometimes for hours.
"The dogs have scared 'em off," said Miss Blake. "That must be the truth." She let the pack hunt for itself at night, and they came back sometimes with bloody jaws. But the prey must have been small, for they were not satisfied. They grew more and more gaunt and wolfish. They would howl for hours, wailing and yelping in ragged cadence to the stars. Table-scraps and brews of Indian meal vanished and left their bellies almost as empty as before.
"And," said Miss Blake, "we got to eat, ourselves."
"Hadn't we better go down to the post-office or to Rusty?" Sheila asked nervously.
Miss Blake snapped at her. "Harness that team now? As much as your life is worth, Sheila! And we can't make it on foot. We'd drop in our tracks and freeze. If it comes to the worst we may have to try it, but—oh, I'll get something to-morrow."
But to-morrow brought no better luck. During the hunting the dogs were left on their chains, and Sheila, through the lonely hours, would watch them through the window and could almost see the wolfishness grow in their deep, wild eyes. She would try to talk to them, pat them, coax them into doggy-ness. But day by day they responded more unwillingly. All but Berg: Berg stayed with her in the house, lay on her feet, leaned against her knee. He shared her meals. He was beginning to swing his heart from Miss Blake to her, and this was the second cause for strife.
Since that one outbreak, Sheila had gone carefully. She was dignified, aloof, very still. She obeyed and slaved as she had never done in the summer days. The dread of physical violence hung on her brain like a cloud. She encouraged Berg's affection, and wondered, if it came to a struggle, whether he would side with her. She was given the opportunity to put this matter to the test.
Miss Blake was very late that night. It was midnight, a stark midnight of stars and biting cold, when Berg stood up from his sleep and barked his low, short bark of welcome. Outside the other dogs broke into their clamor, drowning all other sound, and in the midst of it the door flew rudely open. Miss Blake stood and clung to the side of the door. Her face was bluish-white. She put out her hand toward Sheila, clutching the air. Sheila ran over to her.
"You're hurt?"
"Twisted my blamed ankle. God!" She hobbled over, a heavy arm round Sheila, to her chair and sat there while the girl gave her some brandy, removed the snowshoes, and cut away the boot from a swollen and discolored leg.
"That's the end of my hunting," grunted the patient, who bore the agony of rubbing and bathing stoically. "And, I reckon, I couldn't have stood much more." She clenched her hand in Berg's mane. "God! Those dogs! I'll have to shoot them—next." Sheila looked up to her with a sort of horrified hope. There was then a way out from that fear.
"I'd rather die, I think," said the woman hoarsely. "I love those dogs." Sheila looked up into a tender and quivering face—the face of a mother. "They mean something to me—those brutes. I guess I kind of centered my heart on 'em—out here alone. I raised 'em up, from puppies, all but Berg and the mother. They were the cutest little fellows. I remember when Wreck got porcupine quills in his nose and came to me and lay on his back and whined to me. It was as if he said, 'Help me, momma.' Sure it was. And he pretty near died. Oh, damn! If I have to shoot 'em I might just as well shoot myself and be done with it…Thanks, Sheila. I'll eat my supper here and then you can help me to bed. When my ankle's all well, we can have a try for the post-office, perhaps." She leaned back and drew Berg roughly up against her. She caressed him. He made little soft, throaty sounds of tenderness.
Sheila came back with a tray and, as she came, Berg pulled himself away from his mistress and went wagging over to greet her.
"Come here!" snapped Miss Blake. Berg hesitated, cuddled close to Sheila, and kept step beside her.
Miss Blake's eyes went red. "Come here!" she said again. Berg did not cringe or hasten. He reached Miss Blake's chair at the same instant as Sheila, not a moment earlier.
Miss Blake pulled herself up. The tray went shattering to the floor. She hobbled over to the fire, white with the anguish, took down the whip from its nail. At that Berg cringed and whined. The woman fell upon him with her terrible lash. She held herself with one hand on the mantel-shelf, while with the other she scored the howling victim. His fur came off his back under the dreadful, knife-edge blows.
"Oh, stop!" cried Sheila. "Stop! You're killing him!" She ran over and caught Miss Blake's arm.
"Damn you!" said the woman fiercely. She stood breathing fast. Sweat of pain and rage and exertion stood out on her face. "Do you want that whip?"
She half-turned, lifting her lash, and at that, with a snarl, Berg crouched himself and bared his teeth.
Miss Blake started and stared at him. Suddenly she gave in. Pain and anger twisted her spirit.
"You'd turn my Berg against me!" she choked, and fell heavily down on the rug in a dead faint.
When she came to she was grim and silent. She got herself with scant help to bed, her big bed in the corner of the living-room, and for a week she was kept there with fever and much pain. Berg lay beside her or followed Sheila about her work, and the woman watched them both with ruddy eyes.
CHAPTER XI
THE PACK
In January a wind blew steadily from the east and snow came as if to bury them alive. The cabin turned to a cave, a small square of warmth under a mountain of impenetrable white; one door and one window only, opening to a space of sun. Against the others the blank white lids of winter pressed. Sheila shoveled this space out sometimes twice a day. The dog kennels were moved into it, and stood against the side of a snow-bank eight feet high, up which, when they were unchained, the gaunt, wolfish animals leapt in a loosely formed pack, the great mother, Brenda, at their head, and padded off into the silent woods in their hungry search for food.
But, one day, they refused to go. Miss Blake, her whip in her hand, limped out. The snow had stopped. The day was still and bright again above the snowy firs, the mountain scraped against the blue sky like a cliff of broken ice. The dogs had crept out of their houses and were squatted or huddled in the sun. As she came out they rose and strained at their tethers. One of them whined. Brenda, the mother, bared her teeth. One by one, as they were freed, they slunk close to Miss Blake, looking up into her face. They crowded close at her heels as she went back to the house. She had to push the door to in their very jaws and they pressed against it, their heads hung low, sniffing the odor of food. Presently a long-drawn, hideous howling rose from them. Time and again Miss Blake drove them away with lash and voice. Time and again they came back. They scratched at the threshold, whimpered, and whined.
Sheila and Miss Blake gave them what food they would have eaten themselves that day. It served only to excite their restlessness, to hold them there at the crack of the door, snuffling and slobbering. The outer circle slept, the inner watched. Then they would shift, like sentries. They had a horrible sort of system. Most of that dreadful afternoon Miss Blake paced the floor, trying to strengthen her ankle for the trip to the post-office. At sunset, when the small snow-banked room was nearly dark, she stopped, threw up her head, and looked at Sheila. The girl was sitting on the lowest step of the ladder washing some dried apples. Her face had thinned to a silvery wedge between the thick square masses of her hair. There was a haunted look in her clear eyes. The soft mouth had tightened.
"How in God's name," said Miss Blake, "shall I get 'em on their chains again?"
Sheila stopped her work, and her lips fell helplessly apart. She looked up at the older woman and shook her head.
Miss Blake's fear snapped into a sort of frenzy. She gritted her teeth and stamped. "You simpleton!" she said. "You never have a notion in your head."
Sheila stood up quickly. Something told her that she had better be on her feet. She kept very still. "You will know better than I could what to do about the dogs," she said quietly. "They'll go back on their chains for you, I should think. They're afraid of you."
"Aren't you?" Miss Blake asked roughly.
"No. Of course not."
"You little liar! You're scared half out of your wits. You're scared of the whole thing—scared of the snow, scared of the cold, scared of the dogs, and scared sick of me. Come, now. Tell me the truth."
It was almost her old bluff, bullying tone, but back of it was a disorder of stretched nerves. Sheila weighed her words and tried to weigh her thoughts.
"I don't think I am afraid, Miss Blake. Why should I be afraid of the dogs, if you aren't? And why should I be afraid of you? You have been good to me. You are a good woman."
At this Miss Blake threw back her head and laughed. She was terribly like one of the dogs howling. There was something wild and wolfish in her broad neck and in the sound she made. And she snapped back into silence with wolfish suddenness.
"If you're not scared, then," she scoffed, "go and chain up the dogs yourself."
For an instant Sheila quite calmly balanced the danger out of doors against the danger within.
"I think," she said—and managed one of her drifting smiles—"I think I am a great deal more afraid of the dogs than I am of you, Miss Blake."
The woman studied her for a minute in silence, then she walked over to her elk-horn throne and sat down on it.
She leaned back in a royal way and spread her dark broad hands across the arms.
"Well," she said coolly, "did you hear what I said? Go out and chain up the dogs!"
Sheila held herself like a slim little cavalier. "If I go out," she said coolly, "I will not take a whip. I'll take a gun."
"And shoot my dogs?"
"Miss Blake, what else is left for us to do? We can't let them claw down the door and tear us into bits, can we?"
"You'd shoot my dogs?"
"You said yourself that we might have to shoot them."
Miss Blake gave her a stealthy and cunning look. "Take my gun, then"—her voice rose to a key that was both crafty and triumphant—"and much good it will do you! There's shot enough to kill one if you are a first-rate shot. I lost what was left of my ammunition the day I hurt my ankle. The new stuff is down at the post-office by now, I guess."
The long silence was filled by the shifting of the dog-watch outside the door.
"We must chain them up at any cost," said Sheila. Her lips were dry and felt cold to her tongue.
"Go out and do it, then." The mistress of the house leaned back and crossed her ankles.
"Miss Blake, be reasonable. You have a great deal of control over the
dogs and I have none. I am afraid of them and they will know it.
Animals always know when you're afraid…" Again she managed a smile.
"I shall begin to think you are a coward," she said.
At that Miss Blake stood up from her chair. Her face was red with a violent rush of blood and the sparks in her eyes seemed to have broken into flame.
"Very good, Miss," she said brutally. "I'll go out and chain 'em up and then I'll come back and thrash you to a frazzle. Then you'll know how to obey my orders next time."
She caught up her whip, swung it in her hand, and strode to the door.
"And mind you, Sheila, you won't be able to hide yourself from me. Nor make a getaway. I'll lock this door outside and winter's locked the other. You wait. You'll see what you'll get for calling me a coward. Your friend Berg's gone off on a long hunt … he's left his friends outside there and he's left you…. Understand?"
She shouted roughly to the dogs, snapped her whip, threw open the door, and stepped out boldly. She shut the door behind her and shot a bolt. It creaked as though it had grown rusty with disuse.
In the stillness—for, except for a quick shuffling of paws, there was no sound at first—Sheila chose her weapon of defense. She took down from its place the Eskimo ivory spear, and, holding it short in her hand, she put herself behind the great elk-horn chair. Her Celtic blood was pounding gloriously now. She was not afraid; though if there had been time to notice it, she would have confessed to an abysmal sense of horror and despair. And again she wondered at her own loneliness and youth and the astounding danger that she faced. Yes, it was more astonishment than any other emotion that possessed her consciousness. The horror was below the threshold practicing its part.
Then anger, astonishment, horror itself were suddenly thrown out of her. She was left like an empty vessel waiting to be filled with fear. Miss Blake had cried aloud, "Help, Sheila! Help!" This was followed by a dreadful screaming. Sheila dropped her spear and leapt to the door. On it, outside, Miss Blake beat and screamed, "Open, for God's sake!"
Sheila shouted in as dreadful a key. "On your side—the bolt! Miss
Blake—the bolt!"
Fingers clawed at the bolt, but it would not slip. Through all the horrible sounds the woman made, Sheila could hear the snarling and leaping and snapping of the dogs. She dashed to the small, tight window, broke a pane with her fist, and thrust out her arm. She meant to reach the bolt, but what she saw took the warm life out of her. Miss Blake had gone down under the whirling, slobbering pack. The screaming had stopped. In that one awful look the poor child saw that no human help could save. She dropped down on the floor and lay there moaning, her hands pressed over her ears….
So she lay, shuddering and gasping, the great part of the night. At last the intense cold drove her to the fire. She heaped up the logs high and hung close above them. Her very heart was cold. Liquid ice moved sluggishly along her veins. The morning brought no comfort or courage to her, only a freshening of horror and of fear. The dogs had gone, and all the winter world lay still about the house.
She was shaken by a regular pulse of nervous sobbing. But, driven by a sort of restlessness, she made herself coffee and forced some food down her contracted throat. Then she put on her coat, took down Miss Blake's six-shooter and cartridge belt, and saw, with a slight relaxing of the cramp about her heart, that there were four shots in the chamber. Four shots and eight dogs, but—at least—she could save herself from that death! She strapped the gun round her slim hips, filled her pockets with supplies—a box of dried raisins, some hard bread, a cake of chocolate, some matches—pulled her cap down over her ears, and took her snowshoes from the wall. With closed eyes she put her arm out through the broken pane, and, after a short struggle, slipped the rusty bolt. Then she went over to the door and, leaning against it, prayed. Even with the mysterious strength she drew from that sense of kinship with a superhuman Power, it was a long time before she could force herself to open. At last, with a big gasp, she flung the door wide, skirted the house, her hands against the logs, her eyes shut, ran across the open space, scrambled up the drift, tied on her snowshoes, and fled away under the snow-laden pines. There moved in all the wilderness that day no more hunted and fearful a thing.
The fresh snow sunk a little under her webs, but she was a featherweight of girlhood, and made quicker and easier progress than would have been possible to any one else but a child. And her fear gave her both strength and speed. Sometimes she looked back over her shoulder; always she strained her ears for the pad of following feet. It was a day of rainbows and of diamond spray, where the sun struck the shaken snow sifted from overweighted branches. Sheila remembered well enough the route to the post-office. It meant miles of weary plodding, but she thought that she could do it before night. If not, she would travel by starlight and the wan reflection of the snow. There was no darkness in these clear, keen nights. She would not tell herself what gave her strength such impetus. She thought resolutely of the post-office, of the old, friendly man, of his stove, of his chairs and his picture of the President, of his gun laid across two nails against his kitchen wall—all this, not more than eighteen miles away! And she thought of Hilliard, too; of his young strength and the bold young glitter of his eyes.
She stopped for a minute at noon to drink some water from Hidden Creek and to eat a bite or so of bread. She was pulling on her gloves again when a distant baying first reached her ears. She turned faint, seemed to stand in a mist; then, with her teeth set defiantly, she started again, faster and steadier, her body bent forward, her head turned back. Before her now lay a great stretch of undulating, unbroken white. At its farther edge the line of blue-black pines began again. She strained her steps to reach this shelter. The baying had been very faint and far away—it might have been sounded for some other hunting. She would make the woods, take off her webs, climb up into a tree and, perhaps, attracted by those four shots—no, three, she must save one—some trapper, some unimaginable wanderer in the winter forest, would come to her and rescue her before the end. So her mind twisted itself with hope. But, an hour later, with the pines not very far away, the baying rose so close behind that it stopped her heart. Twenty minutes had passed when above a rise of ground she saw the shaggy, trotting black-gray body of Brenda, the leader of the pack. She was running slowly, her nose close to the snow, casting a little right and left over the tracks. Sheila counted eight—Berg, then, had joined them. She thought that she could distinguish him in the rear. It was now late afternoon, and the sun slanted driving back the shadows of the nearing trees, of Sheila, of the dogs. It all seemed fantastic—the weird beauty of the scene, the weird horror of it. Sheila reckoned the distance before her, reckoned the speed of the dogs. She knew now that there was no hope. Ahead of her rose a sharp, sudden slope—she could never make it. There came to her quite suddenly, like a gift, a complete release from fear. She stopped and wheeled. It seemed that the brutes had not yet seen her. They were nose down at the scent. One by one they vanished in a little dip of ground, one by one they reappeared, two yards away. Sheila pulled out her gun, deliberately aimed and fired.
A spurt of snow showed that she had aimed short. But the loud, sudden report made Brenda swerve. All the dogs stopped and slunk together circling, their haunches lowered. Wreck squatted, threw up his head, and howled. Sheila spoke to them, clear and loud, her young voice ringing out into that loneliness.
"You Berg! Good dog! Come here."
One of the shaggy animals moved toward her timidly, looking back, pausing. Brenda snarled.
"Berg, come here, boy!"
Sheila patted her knee. At this the big dog whined, cringed, and began to swarm up the slope toward her on his belly. His eyes shifted, the struggle of his mind was pitifully visible—pack-law, pack-power, the wolf-heart and the wolf-belly, and against them that queer hunger for the love and the touch of man. Sheila could not tell if it were hunger or loyalty that was creeping up to her in the body of the beast. She kept her gun leveled on him. When he had come to within two feet of her, he paused. Then, from behind him rose the starved baying of his brothers. Sheila looked up. They were bounding toward her, all wolf these—but more dangerous after their taste of human blood than wolves—to the bristling hair along their backs and the bared fangs. Again she fired. This time she struck Wreck's paw. He lifted it and howled. She fired again. Brenda snapped sideways at her shoulder, but was not checked. There was one shot left. Sheila knew how it must be used. Quickly she turned the muzzle up toward her own head.
Then behind her came a sharp, loud explosion. Brenda leapt high into the air and fell at Sheila's feet. At that first rifle-shot, Berg fled with shadow swiftness through the trees. For the rest, it was as though a magic wall had stopped them, as though, at a certain point, they fell upon death. Crack, crack, crack—one after another, they came up, leapt, and dropped, choking and bleeding on the snow. At the end Sheila turned blindly. A yard behind her and slightly above her there under the pines stood Hilliard, very pale, his gun tucked under his arm, the smoking muzzle lowered. Weakly she felt her way up toward him, groping with her hands.
He slid down noiselessly on his long skis and she stood clinging to his arm, looking up dumbly into his strained face.
"I heard your shots," he said breathlessly. "You're within a hundred yards of my house…. For months I've been trying to make up my mind to come to you. God forgive me, Sheila, for not coming before!"
Swinging his gun on its strap across his shoulder, he lifted her in his arms, and, like a child, she was carried through the silence of the woods, all barred with blood-red glimmers from a setting sun.
CHAPTER XII
THE GOOD OLD WORLD AGAIN
Hilliard carried Sheila into the house that he had built for her and laid her down in that big bedroom that "got the morning sun." For a while it seemed to him that she would never open her eyes again, and when she did regain consciousness she was so prostrate with her long fear and the shock of Miss Blake's death that she lay there too weak to smile or speak, too weak almost to breathe. Hilliard turned nurse, a puzzled, anxious nurse. He would sit up in his living-room half the night, and when sleep overpowered his anxiety he would fall prone on the elk-hide rug before his fire.
At last Sheila pulled herself up and crept about the house. She spent a day in the big log chair before Hilliard's hearth, looking very wan, shrinking from speech, her soft mouth gray and drawn.
"Aren't you ever going to smile for me again?" he asked her, after a long half-hour during which he had stood as still as stone, his arm along the pine mantelshelf, looking at her from the shelter of a propping hand.
She lifted her face to him and made a pitiful effort enough. But it brought tears. They ran down her cheeks, and she leaned back and closed her lids, but the crystal drops forced themselves out, clung to her lashes, and fell down on her clenched hands. Hilliard went over to her and took the small, cold hands in both of his.
"Tell me about what happened, Sheila," he begged her. "It will help."
Word by difficult word, he still holding fast to her hands, she sobbed and gasped out her story, to which he listened with a whitening face. He gripped her hands tighter, then, toward the end, he rose with a sharp oath, lit his cigarette, paced to and fro.
"God!" he said at the last. "And she told you I had gone from the country! The devil! I can't help saying it, Sheila—she tortured you. She deserved what God sent her."
"Oh, no!"—Sheila rocked to and fro—"no one could deserve such dreadful terror and pain. She—she wasn't sane. I was—foolish to trust her … I am so foolish—I think I must be too young or too stupid for—for all this. I thought the world would be a much safer place." She looked up again, and speech had given her tormented nerves relief, for her eyes were much more like her own, clear and young again. "Mr. Hilliard—what shall I do with my life, I wonder? I've lost my faith and trustingness. I'm horribly afraid."
He stood before her and spoke in a gentle and reasonable tone. "I'll tell you the answer to that, ma'am," he said. "I've thought that all out while I've been taking care of you."
She waited anxiously with parted lips.
"Well, ma'am, you see—it's like this. I'm plumb ashamed of myself through and through for the way I have acted toward you. I was a fool to listen to that dern lunatic. She told me—lies about you."
"Miss Blake did?"
"Yes, ma'am." His face crimsoned under her look.
Sheila closed her eyes and frowned. A faint pink stole up into her face. She lifted her lids again and he saw the brightness of anger. "And, of course, you took her lies for the truth?"
"Oh, damn! Now you're mad with me and you won't listen to my plan!"
He was so childish in this outbreak that Sheila was moved to dim amusement. "I'm too beaten to be angry at anything," she said. "Just tell me your plan."
"No," he said sullenly. "I'll wait. I'm scared to tell you now!"
She did not urge him, and it was not till the next morning that he spoke about his plan. She had got out to her chair again and had made a pretense of eating an ill-cooked mess of canned stuff which he had brought to her on a tray. It was after he had taken this breakfast away that he broke out as though his excitement had forced a lock.
"I'm going down to Rusty to-day," he said. His eyes were shining. He looked at her boldly enough now.
"And take me?" Sheila half-started up. "And take me?"
"No, ma'am. You're to stay here safe and snug." She dropped back. "I'll leave everything handy for you. There's enough food here for an army and enough fuel…. You're as safe here as though you were at the foot of God's throne. Don't look like that, girl. I can't take you. You're not strong enough to make the journey in this cold, even on a sled. And we can't"—his voice sunk and his eyes fell—"we can't go on like this, I reckon."
"N-no." Sheila's forehead was puckered. Her fingers trembled on the arms of her chair. "N-no…." Then, with a sort of quaver, she added, "Oh, why can't we go on like this?—till the snow goes and I can travel with you!"
"Because," he said roughly, "we can't. You take my word for it." After a pause he went on in his former decisive tone. "I'll be back in two or three days. I'll fetch the parson."
Sheila sat up straight.
His eyes held hers. "Yes, ma'am. The parson. I'm going to marry you, Sheila."
She repeated this like a lesson. "You are going to marry me…."
"Yes, ma'am. You'll have three days to think it over. If you don't want to marry me when the parson comes, why, you can just go back to Rusty with him." He laughed a little, came over to her, put a hand on each arm of her chair, and bent down. She shrank back before him. His eyes had the glitter of a hawk's, and his red and beautiful lips were soft and eager and—again—a little cruel.
"No," he said, "I won't kiss you till I come back—not even for good-bye. Then you'll know how I feel about you. You'll know that I believe that you're a good girl and, Sheila"—here he seemed to melt and falter before her: he slipped down with one of his graceful Latin movements and hid his forehead on her knees—"Sheila, my darling—that I know you are fit—oh, so much more than fit—to be the mother of my children …"
In half an hour, during which they were both profoundly silent, he came to her again. He was ready for his journey. She was sitting far back in her chair, her slim legs stretched out. She raised inscrutable eyes wide to his.
"Good-bye," he said softly. "It's hard to leave you. Good-bye."
She said good-bye even more softly with no change in her look. And he went out, looking at her over his shoulder till the last second. She heard the voice of his skis, hissing across the hard crust of the snow. She sat there stiff and still till the great, wordless silence settled down again. Then she started up from her chair, ran across to the window, and saw that he was indeed gone. She came storming back and threw herself down upon the hide. She cried like a deserted child.
"Oh, Cosme, I'm afraid to be alone! I'm afraid! Why did I let you go?
Come back! Oh, please come back!"
* * * * *
It was late that night when Hilliard reached Rusty, traveling with all his young strength across the easy, polished surface of the world. He was dog-tired. He went first to the saloon. Then to the post-office. To his astonishment he found a letter. It was postmarked New York and he recognized the small, cramped hand of the family lawyer. He took the letter up to his bedroom in the Lander Hotel and sat on the bed, turning the square envelope about in his hands. At last, he opened it.
"MY DEAR COSME [the lawyer had written … he had known Hilliard as a child], It is my strong hope that this letter will reach you promptly and safely at the address you sent me. Your grandfather's death, on the fifteenth instant, leaves you, as you are no doubt aware, heir to his fortune, reckoned at about thirty millions. If you will wire on receipt of this and follow wire in person as soon as convenient, it will greatly facilitate arrangements. It is extremely important that you should come at once. Every day makes things more complicated … in the management of the estate. I remain, with congratulations,
"Sincerely your friend, …"
The young man sat there, dazed.
He had always known about those millions; the expectation of them had always vaguely dazzled his imagination, tampered more than he was aware with the sincerity of his feelings, with the reality of his life; but now the shower of gold had fallen all about him and his fancy stretched its eyes to take in the immediate glitter.
Why, thought Hilliard, this turns life upside down … I can begin to live … I can go East. He saw that the world and its gifts were as truly his as though he were a fairy prince. A sort of confusion of highly colored pictures danced through his quick and ignorant brain. The blood pounded in his ears. He got up and prowled about the little room. It was oppressively small. He felt caged. The widest prairie would have given him scant elbow-room. He was planning his trip to the East when the thought of Sheila first struck him like a cold wave … or rather it was as if the wave of his selfish excitement had crashed against the wave of his desire for her. All was foam and confusion in his spirit. He was quite incapable of self-sacrifice—a virtue in which his free life and his temperament had given him little training. It was simply a war of impulses. His instinct was to give up nothing—to keep hold of every gift. He wanted, as he had never in his life wanted anything before, to have his fling. He wanted his birthright of experience. He had cut himself off from all the gentle ways of his inheritance and lived like a very Ishmael through no fault of his own. Now, it seemed to him that before he settled down to the soberness of marriage, he must take one hasty, heady, compensating draft of life, of the sort of life he might have had. He would go East, go at once; he would fling himself into a tumultuous bath of pleasure, and then he would come back to Sheila and lay a great gift of gold at her feet. He thought over his plans, reconstructing them. He got pen and ink and wrote a letter to Sheila. He wrote badly—a schoolboy's inexpressive letter. But he told his story and his astounding news and drew a vivid enough picture of the havoc it had wrought in his simplicity. He used a lover's language, but his letter was as cold and lumpish as a golden ingot. And yet the writer was not cold. He was throbbing and distraught, confused and overthrown, a boy of fourteen beside himself at the prospect of a holiday … It was a stolen holiday, to be sure, a sort of truancy from manliness, but none the less intoxicating for that. Cosme's Latin nature was on top; Saxon loyalty and conscience overthrown. He was an egoist to his finger-tips that night. He did not sleep a wink, did not even try, but lay on his back across the bed, hands locked over his hair while "visions of sugar plums danced through his head." In the morning he went down and made his arrangements for Sheila, a little less complete, perhaps, than he had intended, for he met a worthy citizen of Rusty starting up the country with a sled to visit his traps and to him he gave the letter and confided his perplexities. It was a hasty interview, for the stage was about to start.
"My wife will sure take your girl and welcome; don't even have to ask her," the kind-eyed old fellow assured Hilliard. "We'll be glad to have her for a couple of months. She'll like the kids. It'll be home for her. Yes, sir"—he patted the excited traveler on the shoulder—"you pile into the stage and don't you worry any. I'll be up at your place before night and bring the lady down on my sled. Yes, sir. Pile in and don't you worry any."
Cosme wrung his hand, avoided his clear eye, and climbed up beside the driver on the stage. He did not look after the trapper. He stared ahead beyond the horses to the high white hill against a low and heavy sky of clouds.
"There's a big snowstorm a comin' down," growled the driver. "Lucky if we make The Hill to-day. A reg'lar oldtimer it's agoin' to be. And cold—ugh!"
Cosme hardly heard this speech. The gray world was a golden ball for him to spin at his will. Midas had touched the snow. The sleigh started with a jerk and a jingle. In a moment it was running lightly with a crisp, cutting noise. Cosme's thoughts outran it, leaping toward their gaudy goal … a journey out to life and a journey back to love—no wonder his golden eyes shone and his cheeks flushed.
"You look almighty glad to be going out of here," the driver made comment.
Hilliard laughed an explosive and excited laugh. "No almighty gladder than I shall be to be coming back again," he prophesied.
But to prophesy is a mistake. One should leave the future humbly on the knees of the gods. That night, when Hilliard was lying wakeful in his berth listening to the click of rails, the old trapper lay under the driving snow. But he was not wakeful. He slept with no visions of gold or love, a frozen and untroubled sleep. He had caught his foot in a trap, and the blizzard had found him there and had taken mercy on his pain. They did not find his body until spring, and then Cosme's letter to Sheila lay wet and withered in his pocket.
CHAPTER XIII
LONELINESS
The first misery of loneliness takes the form of a restless inability to concentrate. It is as if the victim wanted to escape from himself. After Cosme's departure Sheila prowled about the silent cabin, began this bit of work and that, dropped it, found herself staring vaguely, listening, waiting, and nervously shook herself into activity again. She tried to whistle, but it seemed like somebody else's music and frightened her ears. At dusk she fastened sacking across the uncurtained windows, lighted both Cosme's lamps, bringing the second from her bedroom, and heaped up a dancing and jubilant fire upon the hearth. In the midst of this illumination she sat, very stiff and still, in the angular elk-hide-covered chair, and knitted her hands together on her knee. Her mind was now intensely active; memories, thoughts, plans, fancies racing fast and furious like screen pictures across her brain. And they seemed to describe themselves in loud whispers. She had difficulty in keeping these voices from taking possession of her tongue.
"I don't want to talk to myself," she murmured, and glanced over her shoulder.
A man has need of his fellows for a shield. Man is man's shelter from all the storm of unanswered questions. Where am I? What am I? Why am I?—No reply. No reassuring double to take away the ghost-sense of self, that unseen, intangible aura of personality in which each of us moves as in a cloud. In the souls of some there is an ever-present Man God who will forever save them from this supreme experience. Sheila's religion, vague, conventional, childish, faltered away from her soul. Except for her fire, which had a sort of sympathy of life and warmth and motion, she was unutterably alone. And she was beginning to suffer from the second misery of solitude—a sense of being many personalities instead of one. She seemed to be entertaining a little crowd of confused and argumentative Sheilas. To silence them she fixed her mind on her immediate problem.
She tried to draw Hilliard close to her heart. She had an honest hunger for his warm and graceful beauty, for his young strength, but this natural hunger continually shocked her. She tried not to remember the smoothness of his neck as her half-conscious hands had slipped away from it that afternoon when he raised her from the snow. It seemed to her that her desire for him was centered somewhere in her body. Her mind remained cool, detached, critical, even hostile. She disliked the manner of his wooing—not that there should have been any insult to the pride of a nameless little adventurer, Hudson's barmaid, a waif, in being told that she was a "good girl" and fit to be the mother of this young man's children. But Sheila knew instinctively that these things could not be said, could not even be thought of by such a man as Marcus Arundel. She remembered his words about her mother…. Sheila wanted with a great longing to be loved like that, to be so spoken of, so exquisitely entreated. A phrase in Hudson's letter came to her mind, "I handled you in my heart like a flower" … Unconsciously she pressed her hand against her lips, remembered the taste of whiskey and of blood. If only it had been Dickie's lips that had first touched her own. Blinding tears fell. The memory of Dickie's comfort, of Dickie's tremulous restraint, had a strange poignancy…. Why was he so different from all the rest? So much more like her father? What was there in this pale little hotel clerk who drank too much that lifted him out and up into a sort of radiance? Her memory of Dickie was always white—the whiteness of that moonlight of their first, of that dawn of their last, meeting. He had had no chance in his short, unhappy, and restricted life—not half the chance that young Hilliard's life had given him—to learn such delicate appreciations, such tenderness, such reserves. Where had he got his delightful, gentle whimsicalities, that sweet, impersonal detachment that refused to yield to stupid angers and disgusts? He was like—in Dickie's own fashion she fumbled for a simile. But there was no word. She thought of a star, that morning star he had drawn her over to look at from the window of her sitting-room. Perhaps the artist in Sylvester had expressed itself in this son he so despised; perhaps Dickie was, after all, Hudson's great work … All sorts of meanings and symbols pelted Sheila's brain as she sat there, exciting and fevering her nerves.
In three days Hilliard would be coming back. His warm youth would again fill the house, pour itself over her heart. After the silence, his voice would be terribly persuasive, after the loneliness, his eager, golden eyes would be terribly compelling! He was going to "fetch the parson" … Sheila actually wrung her hands. Only three days for this decision and, without a decision, that awful, helpless wandering, those dangers, those rash confidences of hers. "O God, where are you? Why don't you help me now?" That was Sheila's prayer. It gave her little comfort, but she did fall asleep from the mental exhaustion to which it brought at least the relief of expression.
When she woke, she found the world a horrible confusion of storm. It could hardly be called morning—a heavy, flying darkness of drift, a wind filled with icy edges that stung the face and cut the eyes, a wind with the voice of a driven saw. The little cabin was caught in the whirling heart of a snow spout twenty feet high. The firs bent and groaned. There is a storm-fear, one of the inherited instinctive fears. Sheila's little face looked out of the whipped windows with a pinched and shrinking stare. She went from window to hearth, looking and listening, all day. A drift was blown in under the door and hardly melted for all the blazing fire. That night she couldn't go to bed. She wrapped herself in blankets and curled herself up in the chair, nodding and starting in the circle of the firelight.
For three terrible days the world was lost in snow. Before the end of that time Sheila was talking to herself and glad of the sound of her own hurried little voice. Then, like God, came a beautiful stillness and the sun. She opened the door on the fourth morning and saw, above the fresh, soft, ascending dazzle of the drift, a sky that laughed in azure, the green, snow-laden firs, a white and purple peak. She spread out her hands to feel the sun and found it warm. She held it like a friendly hand. She forced herself that day to shovel, to sweep, even to eat. Perhaps Cosme would be back before night. He and the parson would have waited for the storm to be over before they made their start. She believed in her own excuses for five uneasy days, and then she believed in the worst of all her fears. She had a hundred to choose from—Cosme's desertion, Cosme's death…. One day she spent walking to and fro with her nails driven into her palms.
* * * * *
Late that night the white world dipped into the still influence of a full white moon. Before Hilliard's cabin the great firs caught the light with a deepening flush of green, their shadows fell in even lavender tracery delicate and soft across the snow, across the drifted roof. The smoke from the half-buried chimney turned to a moving silver plume across the blue of the winter night sky—intense and warm as though it reflected an August lake.
The door of the cabin opened with a sharp thrust and Sheila stepped out. She walked quickly through the firs and stood on the edge of the open range-land, beyond and below which began the dark ridge of the primeval woods. She stood perfectly still and lifted her face to the sky. For all the blaze of the moon the greater stars danced in radiance. Their constellations sloped nobly across her dazzled vision. She had come very close to madness, and now her brain was dumb and dark as though it had been shut into a blank-walled cell. She stood with her hands hanging. She had no will nor wish to pray. The knowledge had come to her that if she went out and looked this winter Pan in the face, her brain would snap, either to life or death. It would burst its prison … She stared, wide-eyed, dry-eyed, through the immense cold height of air up at the stars.
All at once a door flew open in her soul and she knew God … no visible presence and yet an enveloping reality, the God of the savage earth, of the immense sky, of the stars, the God unsullied and untempted by man's worship, no God that she had ever known, had ever dreamed of, had ever prayed to before. She did not pray to Him now. She let her soul stand open till it was filled as were the stars and the earth with light….
The next day Sheila found her voice and sang at her work. She gave herself an overwhelming task of cleaning and scrubbing. She was on her knees like a charwoman, sniffing the strong reek of suds, when there came a knocking at her door. She leapt up with pounding heart. But the knocking was more like a scraping and it was followed by a low whine. For a second Sheila's head filled with a fog of terror and then came a homely little begging bark, just the throaty, snuffling sob of a homeless puppy. Sheila took Cosme's six-shooter, saw that it was loaded, and, standing in the shelter of the door, she slowly opened it. A few moments later the gun lay a yard away on the soapy, steaming floor and Berg was held tight in her arms. His ecstasy of greeting was no greater than her ecstasy of welcome. She cried and laughed and hugged and kissed him. That night, after a mighty supper, he slept on her bed across her feet. Two or three times she woke and reached her hand down to caress his rough thick coat. The warmth of his body mounted from her feet to her heart. She thought that he had been sent to her by that new God. As for Berg, he had found his God again, the taming touch of a small human hand.
* * * * *
It was in May, one morning in May—she had long ago lost count of her days—when Sheila stepped across her sill and saw the ground. Just a patch it was, no bigger than a tablecloth, but it made her catch her breath. She knelt down and ran her hands across it, sifted some gravel through her fingers. How strange and various and colorful were the atoms of stone, rare as jewels to her eyes so long used to the white and violet monotony of snow. Beyond the gravel, at the very edge of the drift, a slender crescent of green startled her eyes and—yes—there were a dozen valorous little golden flowers, as flat and round as fairy doubloons.
Attracted by her cry, Berg came out, threw up his nose, and snuffed. Spring spoke loudly to his nostrils. There was sap, rabbits were about—all of it no news to him. Sheila sat down on the sill and hugged him close. The sun was warm on his back, on her hands, on the boards beneath her.
"May—May—May—" she whispered, and up in the firs quite suddenly, as though he had thrown reserve to the four winds, a bluebird repeated her "May—May—May" on three notes, high, low, and high again, a little musical stumble of delight. It had begun again—that whistling-away of winter fear and winter hopelessness.
The birds sang and built and the May flies crept up through the snow and spun silver in the air for a brief dazzle of life.
The sun was so warm that Berg and Sheila dozed on their doorsill. They did little else, these days, but dream and doze and wait.
The snow melted from underneath, sinking with audible groans of collapse and running off across the frozen ground to swell Hidden Creek. The river roared into a yellow flood, tripped its trees, sliced at its banks. Sheila snowshoed down twice a day to look at it. It was a sufficient barrier, she thought, between her and the world. And now, she had attained to the savage joy of loneliness. She dreaded change. Above all she dreaded Hilliard. That warmth of his beauty had faded utterly from her senses. It seemed as faint as a fresco on a long-buried wall. Intrusion must bring anxiety and pain, it might bring fear. She had had long communion with her stars and the God whose name they signaled. She, with her dog friend under her hand, had come to something very like content.
The roar of Hidden Creek swelled and swelled. After the snow had shrunk into patches here and there under the pines and against hilly slopes, there was still the melting of the mountain glaciers.
"Nobody can possibly cross!" Sheila exulted. "A man would have to risk his life." And it was in one of those very moments of her savage self-congratulation when there came the sound of nearing hoofs.
She was sitting on her threshold, watching the slow darkness, a sifting-down of ashes through the still air. It was so very still that the little new moon hung there above the firs like faint music. Silver and gray, and silver and green, and violet—Sheila named the delicacies of dappled light. The stars had begun to shake little shivers of radiance through the firs. They were softer than the winter stars—their keenness melted by the warm blue of the air. Sheila sat and held her knees and smiled. The distant, increasing tumult of the river, so part of the silence that it seemed no sound at all, lulled her—Then—above it—the beat of horse's hoofs.
At first she just sat empty of sensation except for the shock of those faint thuds of sound. Then her heart began to beat to bursting; with dread, with a suffocation of suspense. She got up, quiet as a thief. The horse stopped. There came a step, rapid and eager. She fled like a furtive shadow into the house, fell on her knees there by the hearth, and hid her face against the big hide-covered chair. Her eyes were full of cold tears. Her finger-tips were ice. She was shaking—shuddering, rather—from head to foot. The steps had come close, had struck the threshold. There they stopped. After a pause, which her pulses filled with shaken rhythm, her name was spoken—So long it had been since she had heard it that it fell on her ear like a foreign speech.
"Sheila! Sheila!"
She lifted her head sharply. It was not Hilliard's voice.
"Sheila—" There was such an agony of fear in the softly spoken syllables, there was such a weight of dread on the breath of the speaker, that, for very pity, Sheila forgot herself. She got up from the floor and moved dazedly to meet the figure on the threshold. It was dimly outlined against the violet evening light. Sheila came up quite close and put her hands on the tense, hanging arms. They caught her. Then she sobbed and laughed aloud, calling out in her astonishment again and again, softly, incredulously—
"You, Dickie? Oh, Dickie, Dickie, it's—you?"