"The steamer goes out at ten. Pack a basket, Rachel."
Helen left the room with a rush. Mavering looked after her with wakened interest. "Who and what is this?" Rachel came to him and pleaded.
"I owe her everything. You left me so desperate—"
"I left you? I seem to have forgotten that."
"I thought there was nothing more for me. She brought me to life again. Help her, Jack. I think we can neither of us change. I think it will be the old story again. But I'll try."
Mavering looked down and felt a touch of compunction curious to himself.
"I suppose the anchorite was correct—problematical, but accurate. I don't carry your price. You're too expensive for me. As to the anchorite. I'll find him and bring him back, dead or alive. That's cheap, but the rest of it is expensive."
A half hour later the white steamer was ploughing down the river. Mavering, in the long, nearly empty cabin, stretched himself on a sofa, denounced the execrable taste of steamboat furnishing, and went philosophically to sleep. Helen, on the upper deck, stared at the starlit Virginia shore.
Chapter XXI
In Which We Go Down the River and Return
A loud wind blew up the river, cold, sombre, insistent. The river seemed to tremble in waves and shiver in wrinkles under the monotonous threatening of the wind, the stars to be fretful in their bleak spaces. "Forever is a long time." Helen wrapped her cloak more closely.
"Dead!" The wind stated it coldly, insistently, and did not mind how fiercely she denied it. It was only the surface of the river that trembled and glimmered so. The inevitable reality was the current below—dark, steady, and leading downward to that sea from which the cold wind came with insistent statement. If men and women were incidents to powers beneath and influences over them, like the myriad tiny flickers born of coincidences between the divinity of the stars and the toil of the river; if one only carried for a short time this little torch of courage in a night without horizon; and behind the surface of things "their substance and third dimension," in Gard's phrase, stretched away into a ghostly distance; yet it was inborn in Helen to carry her torch high, to lay lance in rest and challenge the ghostliest shadow in sight, to be herself personal and definite, to accuse even abstractions of personality, to make a vivid world of nearby things and live vividly within it.
In that world, life had seemed mainly to consist of purpose and achievement; but on the wide river between the crouching shores that night—with the wind calling continually. "Dead, dead"—wishes, resolves, and actions to follow them, how shrunken and chilled they seemed, if one were only an accidental wrinkle on the river, possibly a glimmer if a star happened to look that way!
"It is not true!" She went in and saw lamps swinging the length of the saloon, where men were asleep on the sofas and the floor.
The engines throbbed and the paddle-wheels creaked and splashed near the window of her state-room. She lay awake, and yet seemed to hear sounds like a moaning organ, to see Gard's face floating, white and motionless, in black water, and moving down seaward with a tide that she tried to block with her hands. She started up, choking and sobbing, and heard the engines throb, the paddle-wheel creak and splash.
It was still dark when the steamer drew in to a wharf. Lights were moving about. There were three or four houses, a flag flapping sulkily in the wind, a train of cars and a puffing engine, a line of black bluffs against the sky. It was misty dawn when the train started south, and full sunrise when she stepped from the train with Mavering and saw a house with high porch on a hill; below, near a grove, the brigade hospital tents. The big, hurrying surgeon said: "Move him! Good God!—I beg your pardon—yes. It's run mighty low. It needs warming and coaxing. There's da—I beg your pardon—there's very little of either here. This is the first time in six weeks the army of the Potomac has had any luck, to my knowledge." He looked at Helen suddenly, dropped his gallantry, and continued, gravely: "As to the chances, since you ask me, I suspect there are complications. But as an alternative to nights as cold as this, I should say, do almost anything." A moment's silence, and he went on: "They lie around here, about five hundred to an acre, several acres of them. That's the trouble. However, I knew Captain Windham. I admired him—this is the tent. I hope you have everything you need. Give him brandy and milk. The train goes back about eight. Good-bye." The big surgeon hurried away.
Mavering stepped in behind her, looked around, and said: "Exactly. The pirate's gone." Helen did not hear him. A pile of straw and some blankets, a black cloak, the white face against it, like one drowned and going seaward with a tide. She dropped on her knees and bent over it. "Will you get the things," she half whispered, looking around—"a stretcher and some men? Please take my purse and come back in time for the train."
Mavering went out. In the way of descriptive adjectives he thought "fierce" was the word. She looked "fierce." "And," he reflected. "I dare say a man may turn out a domestic cat if he were half drowned and properly stroked and not too old. Quien sabe? If the anchorite comes to, I'm gambling my gray hairs he's tamed. Gray hairs are distinctly a misfortune."
Helen leaned close over. The "must" and "shall" that absorbed her seemed straining at her eyes and lips. She felt as if she were lifting a weight. "You must, Gard, you must stay"—struggling to keep the white face from going down in the suck of an undertow, drawn under by some blind power that knew no measures of values or who loved and remembered and who forgot.
Measure of values! Your bullet goes forth in a pointed manner, appears to be determined, purposeful, greatly in earnest, and buries itself in a sand-bank, or the brain of a scholar—all one to the bullet, all one to the rifleman who knows nothing of the matter, all one to the per cent. of averages, to the flowing laws and far-off events of the universe.
"But you must, Gard, you must stay." So tiny a torch to shake with such insistence at the wide night and call on its hurrying storms to stop! Enter demurral and private petition to those high courts and abstract legislatures! "The constitution does not provide for you in person."
"Then amend it. It should. It does me wrong. What are laws for if not for justice?"
"They are not at the call of human justice."
"Ah, then, not justice! But have pity, or forget and go by! Only let me keep him. I love him. I will not let him go."
The protest seems almost as persistent as the law. After all, it might be itself a law or an amendment in process of making, this protest. But if Gard Windham should not go on that adventure and exploration, inferred by Mavering to be, perhaps, Arctic in character, and should linger back to life in the course of event and not by virtue of an amendment, probably Helen would not care how it came about.
She did not care how the men with the stretcher looked, how they took off their caps or whispered. The moving train and the steamboat were vague things aside. Both were crowded, but no one spoke to her. It seemed to be arranged, recognized, and admitted.
A group gathered about Mavering on deck, who said: "Why, it appears to me a situation that doesn't admit of remark. It looks like a case of stand off and clear the road. It has that distinguished appearance." And there was a murmur of assent.
The wounded, sitting or lying about on both decks and in the cabin, were wretched and sinister sights. Some babbled in delirium; a few, like Gard, were sunk in torpor, unconscious of their issues. The steamer ploughed through splashing and gurgling water. The driven, wintry clouds streamed across the sky, gray and ragged as battle-torn banners. Hawks floated over the river, graceful in their savage hunt over the double-decked steamer loaded with human pain bound for the hospitals. And Helen noticed and remembered nothing of it. She seemed to herself more like a ghost alone with Gard, who was another ghost. Empty space was around them, the existence of both so tenuous that it consisted only of the faint pulse-beat in his wrist, which she held. This beat was the measure of the flight of time, and the slender thread that bound the world together. It used to seem to her that Gard was too intangible, almost unreal. One could not say what he was like. What did he mean by: "I don't care whether I'm an admirable person or not; I'm a partially illuminated point, floating along I don't know where or why. What's the use of caring? There's too much before and after?" Or: "Every one lives in a dungeon; he doesn't know any other dungeon than his own?" And when he used to play the organ in Saint Mary's and fill the great church with mystical voices, he had seemed to her something not of the daily world, but of a world partly like the one in which she built her own fanciful castles; only it was wider and more peculiar, and the powers in it were strong and strange. However apart from Gard himself her idea of him may have been, it was one which this long watch beside him, the touch of the slow pulse, and the knowledge of how closely he now at least moved along the frontier of shadows, only made more intimate. The organ was not needed to interpret him. She felt that she knew what he was like. She thought the pulse-beat spoke, as the organ used to speak, with the same swift, immediate presence, and that, when she whispered "You must stay," it throbbed an answer: "You mean, come back. You've no idea how far it is down here, and very curious. But maybe I can, if you'll hold your end of whatever it is." And so the crowd and the murmur, the babbling in delirium of the man on the next stretcher, the laboring of the steamer ploughing up stream, the passing of hours, all seemed moved apart from her. Sometimes the distant consciousness would seem to almost or quite return, and look out at her under wavering eyelashes. The lips moved, and she fancied they said, "I knew you were there." She became aware, at the same time, that the steamer had stopped, that the stretchers were being carried out in procession, and that over her stood Mavering, Rachel, and Thaddeus Bourn; and of these she was hardly aware enough to be surprised at Thaddeus. When they came to the house with the white door, and he drew her aside a moment, she half resisted in a dazed way, and felt as if not to be close to Gard were against nature and reason. Thaddeus drew her into the sitting-room. The men had carried Gard to the room beyond. They had set down the stretcher and were moving him.
"In point of fact," began Thaddeus, "I've come to take you home. Your mother is—a—not so well. I fear it is quite serious. I wrote you, but it did not at that time seem serious. A woman of astonishing placidity, my dear, which I have sometimes felt tempted to recommend, in fact, to your imitation. But the circumstances are such now that it would not. I might say, be in good taste. Her condition is, I regret to say—seems to be—but perhaps to-morrow."
He was not sure she heard him.
"Oh yes, to-morrow."
To-morrow might be what it liked if he would let her go now. She slipped away. The men came out and left the house. Rachel followed with Mavering and closed the door. After a time Thaddeus said:
"Relative to a certain estate, Mrs. Mavering, in which you and I made investments, undertook a trusteeship, has it not, in your opinion, been administered somewhat—a—speculatively? It appears to me to be loaded, I might say, with liabilities. I do not see that the—a—securities are ascertained."
"Oh! but I think he will get well."
"Granted—and then?"
"He must care for her."
"Granted—a—it would seem probable, and then?"
He deliberately refrained from looking at Mavering, who was examining Thaddeus, his gold-rimmed glasses and accurate tailoring, with speculative interest.
"I doubt whether you can argue from me," said Mavering, serenely. Rachel flushed and Thaddeus protested.
"Oh, I beg—"
"Not at all. It is admitted that the garb of civil society has never fitted me. Any coat will go on me, but none will fit to the satisfaction of fashion. But as to the anchorite, I would not argue a parallel. I suspect he will cut his coat to newer fashions than mine—possibly than yours. My dear sir, I'm an egoist and you're an egoist."
"True," murmured Thaddeus, "a social egoist."
Mavering stopped long enough to reflect that he liked this Thaddeus Bourn, a man apparently with conversations in him.
"Very good. And so it occurs to me in passing that I may be the more elementary, anterior type; and, say, Morgan Map, a still further elementary, anterior, antediluvian—"
"Excellent!" cried Thaddeus; "excellent choice of phrase! My idea exactly! I said a primary, primitive, primordial."
"Good words, all of them—descriptive and discreet."
The two smiled at each other with appreciation.
"Map might do," continued Mavering, "if he had all the room there was. He needs more room, properly for his state of culture, even than I do. Now the anchorite—I refer to Captain Windham—is, if an egoist, possibly a fourth kind; I am inclined to think—to question—whether we might not argue him even in advance in continuance of this theory, which. I perceive you agree with me, is not without interest."
"But," said Thaddeus, distinguishing, marking precision with his eye-glass, held between two fingers, "as regards, now, a definition."
"I leave it to your more discriminating choice. I contribute this observation, however, that when the anchorite wants more room he is apt to climb into the air for it, instead of quarrelling with his neighbors on the earth."
Mavering took his leave. Rachel went to the window and stood looking after him. Thaddeus polished his glasses, and thought that Mavering was evidently a man with conversation in him.
Chapter XXII
Of Mavering, Who Disappears—Of the Gray Poet—Of
Morgan, Who Appears Once More
When Gard returned to the knowledge of the light, he brought with him the impression that Helen was near. It was an irritating shock not to find her. He remembered a number of widely separated moments when he had been conscious of physical things—unless all these were vagrant dreams: the rain on the tent, the surgeon, the bitter cold, and Helen sitting there holding his wrist. The last was a portrait without surroundings or background. Her hair was pushed away from her forehead, and her eyes had seemed to probe and search for him down wherever he was lost.
Mrs. Mavering sat beside him now. She shook her head to signify silence when he wished to say something, to question her about this doubt; so that he fell to staring at the ceiling and trying to work his brain, How slowly the ideas moved, how reluctant they were, how pale and unsuggestive! To remember something was to pull a long, sagging rope, until at last the remembrance would emerge from a tideless, flat sea in a drowned condition. It was exasperating of Helen not to be there. The exasperation lasted four months.
The days and weeks slipped by, marked less by nights and days than by bits of information given and assimilated at intervals. He learned where he was and how he came there, and brooded over the subject, turned it slowly in his mind, and concluded to go on turning it. It had innumerable sides, surfaces, depths—some that were astonishing, some that melted into day dreams. It seemed to him that he was on the way to recover in time—a doctor, in fact, with side whiskers, gray and pendent, came periodically, and stated as much in a loud voice, and in that case he was glad that life looked interesting and came towards him with shining approach. The winter sunlight falling through clear panes under white, translucent curtains was as if newly washed.
It is said that the secret of the strong, temperate zones lies in their winter and spring, the antiseptic storms, the trance, and burial, and then the cleansed revival, the issues of a fresh seed-time. And there appear to be certain bitter waters, flowing near the roots of existence, in which, if it so happens to a man, he may wash his eyes clear of confusion, and afterwards wonder how it came that he was once weary of living. So it seemed to Gard that he had gone around a circle and begun a new season of expectation. He was that black-robed acolyte again, slim and somewhat pale, who, in breathless eagerness to see and know, had come out of the door of the brotherhood's brick-walled court-yard into the hurrying avenue, hearing the high fluting. "Follow, follow," looking for a banner and sword and shield, possibly for a girl in the brakes with sunlight on her hair, at least for something he had not tried to explain to the Father Superior. Whatever his motives and purposes then, they had become clouded since, and were clear again, and calling, "It is time to be alive and out among the melodies." It was good—the mere living; a handsomely furnished world, with a number of things in it.
Mrs. Mavering went away in the late winter. Widow Bourn died in January, when wild winds and snows were beating against the combative little church, and Helen was alone in the cottage, except for an elderly woman, depressed and angular, in the kitchen. Helen refused to go to Thaddeus, to his bewildered disgust. Mrs. Mavering, for some reason, did not think the refusal strange, but she became intent for the North as soon as she heard it.
"May I come, too, Lady Rachel? I mean when this mossy-whiskered physician unties me."
"May!" she said, scornfully. "You must. Where else should you go?"
"It's queer, but it seems like home, Hagar. I never saw it. Wasn't Hagar the mother of homeless Ishmaelites?"
So Mrs. Mavering was gone. One Sabrina, a fat negro woman, was left, who shook the floor with her tread, who wore extraordinary green kerchiefs on her head, and exploded in a melting gobble of mirth at Gard's every remark, till humor became a burden and he tried depression. "I shall die, Sabrina." Sabrina gobbled with joy. He tried wrath. "You're a galoop, Sabrina, a galoop!"—and Sabrina spilled his coffee over her billows of delight.
Mavering appeared and disappeared, brought with him once a big, deep-breathing man, slightly singular in dress, with a blown, gray beard and hair, soft eyes, and affectionate, impulsive ways. Mavering introduced him.
"He calls himself a poet, not a Plesiosaurus. His poetry looks as if it were written, nevertheless, by a saurian with one of his fins. I recommend you two to mutual and plastic embraces." Afterwards the gray man came often of himself, and would sit by the bedside, holding Gard's white, bony fingers, and recite:
Or, "The Song of Myself"—
They grew suddenly friendly and confident, and talked art and letters. "Some of that is good stuff," Gard remarked, "and it's all yeasty—something stirring in it. But I don't see—Here, you're an egoist, too—you simply whoop with it—and impartially affectionate at the same time as a self-obliterated Buddhist."
"They are one. The more I love myself, the more I love you."
"But what do you mean by, 'If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, translucent mould of me'? Now, that's belated Greek."
"It's nothing old. It's new and democratic."
Gard grumbled feebly.
"It sounds queer enough for a gospel. It won't do for me now. I shall have to fat up to it."
The gray man leaned forward with that tremulous, dewy look in his eyes. He seemed to have an immense capacity of feeling, a physique made large to endure it.
"You didn't love yourself enough. All that wasn't love. You didn't love any one. Love inward, love outward, love everywhere, love some one most, love many much. All empty without that, a drifting boat without anchor. You look for the boatman. No one there. Drowned? No. Never was there."
After a long silence—"Say that 'Cradle' thing again. It's a man's soul in the body of a whale. I don't believe it's new and democratic. It must be old and human. But I know what you mean."
So February and March were gone. Mavering said there was a big fight coming, went away, and came no more; nor the gray man, either, who was absorbed in his hospitals and his "average young man," and grown hollow-eyed with watchings and strenuous sympathy. Everything gone, nothing coming except spring and letters from Hagar; nothing staying except Gard himself and Sabrina, who reminded one of melting butter, but of whom the quantity grew no less. "Hagar! Hagar!" the high fluting voice seemed now to call continually, till the tension of his longing, Gard fancied, would pull Hagar to him if he did not go soon.
Late in April they packed him into a night train, and all night, or whenever he awoke and looked out, the earth seemed to be running away southward, as if sucked towards the whirlpool of the war, but the stars to be travelling northward with him. How impatient they were! How they snapped and danced and quivered! "Hurry, hurry! But you will see how we will shine over Hagar and forget the bleak laws of our journeyings, and be night-lamps in Helen's garden."
In the morning the train stood still in the terminal. He had some hours to wait. He crept through the station. The rattle and roar of the city met him at the door. The few returning soldiers like himself were lost in pursuing crowds, the only signs here of the war that to southward had seemed branded on the soil and written across the street fronts. A policeman caught sight of his uniform, and added some points to his rank, out of benevolence.
"What'll you have, colonel?"
"I think I'll have a cab."
The hurrying crowd paused, and cheered huskily when he drove away. He had the cab-man drive across town and down the old avenue. At the church of the Holy Trinity there was a morning service beginning, and he climbed the steps. Within, a few hundred people were scattered about. The only sound was the moaning of the organ. High up at one side he could see Moselle's hunched shoulders and dingy yellow head, faded with age, against the blue and gilded pipes. Moselle began to play a prelude, something stately and stern, like the thousand-century-old front of a gray crag, that might be well known but never could be familiar. The dingy old head moved Gard more than the prelude. He went back to the cab and drove down towards the Brotherhood. There was no flowing river so strange as the flowing river of the street. Every one was isolated, no doubt; but, after all, there was a bond. It ought to be celebrated and sworn to. A truckman on top of a dray looked down and probably caught him smiling to himself, grinned, and shouted, "How goes it?" Here and there on the sidewalk, too, men called out to him. Every door and window here between Trinity and the Brotherhood was familiar, and the brick walls and shuttered windows of the Brotherhood were eloquent. He thought. "I'll go in another time, and see Francis and his sick flower-bed, and the school and Andrew. It would scare me into a relapse to see the Superior now. Nobody but the bonus Deus ever understood him, and the bonus Deus is in Hagar."
So he went back to the station. The train ran for an hour or more past glimpses of the sea, and then turned up the Wyantenaug Valley. At Hamilton he changed cars. The brave old river sweeps around a curve, and Hamilton lies in the curve. He could see the tower of the grand-stand in the Fair grounds, and Saint Mary's among the other steeples, but he sat still on the station platform, saw his trunk go by on a hand-truck, and watched beyond the freight-yards the rippling, glinting river, hurrying, busy, with its myriad little shining points of happiness. Was it the languor of his weariness or a magic in the river that flowed down from that promised land of Beulah, the mythical Hagar, the mother of the homeless—a Mecca, a Bethlehem, an Arden of wise flowers and musical brooks? The river seemed to gesture, and mutter syllables and sentences. Some one spoke loudly over his head. He looked up and saw Morgan Map.
"Going up the valley? So am I," Morgan said, and Gard nodded languidly. It occurred to him, slowly, that he ought to be surprised. "The train's ready. Come along."
A practical man, this Map, Gard thought—a very genius of accomplishment. Why should he go into Beulah, too? Why not? But he must be doing something here, this forcible schemer, who did nothing unaccountably. If he meditated violence, it was a poor place for it. Much better to have set fire to the house near the hospital, or corrupted Sabrina and poisoned the breakfast. Still—Gard pulled himself slowly up the car steps. His knees had not yet recovered from their wavering inadequacy—still, it was what Mavering would have called "a sportsmanlike situation." Map might try some simple, antique, and desperate thing. In that case it would be well to get one's gun where it could be pulled suddenly. Gunpowder was the handicap that made an invalid even with two hundred pounds and six-feet-two of red-haired, aggressive health. And all that was nonsense. What a sinewy force it was—this love of a woman!—that suddenly snapped a man's habits apart, dragged all his other motives indifferently after it; one of the universal energies. Joy and desperation, and the beast and the climbing soul, seemed packed in it more closely side by side than in any other experience.
Two or three men were in the car at one end. Morgan went to the other end and pulled over a seat. The two sat down facing each other, and Morgan produced cigars.
"I'm glad you brought these, however you happen to be here," said Gard. "The doctor forbids them, so I don't carry any, but accept them from fate. It's a fine point of casuistry. I disliked that doctor—I disliked his whiskers, mostly. They used to get twisted up in my feverish nightmares. Did you happen to be here?"
"No. I found out what time you were going, got leave of absence and came along."
"To see where I was going? I don't know that I understand why."
"Oh, partly. I had a general plan. I'll explain. I'm a practical man," he went on, quietly, after a moment. "I don't believe in loading up with the past. No scruples and no malice. What's no use to remember I forget. They're all dead weight. I cut loose. That's the way I'm made. Now, I don't know how you're made—don't know what kind you are."
"Neither do I. I'm going up to Hagar to find out."
"Well! I said; I'm done, hedged out; hedged in, too. The question is, Can I cut out—cut loose? It depends on Windham. The more I thought about it the more I didn't get any definition of you. I concluded to come along—see what could be done—clear up the ground—know what's to pay. If you go to Hagar with the purpose supposed, that's all right. I'm done, anyway. I have an errand of my own there—which doesn't concern you, however. I throw up my hand. I was in hell and played for keeps. I say now, a man that's won needn't bear malice. No use in that. He can call me what he chooses if it eases his mind. That won't hurt me any, nor him. He's safe. He needn't be dainty. It's a fact. I sent a tracer after you up the Shenandoah. God knows why it missed, I don't. I could have sworn there was daylight through Jack Mavering's head. Missed again. He walked in on me in Mrs. Mavering's sitting-room and made me feel like a wet hen. I put my head in my pocket and walked out. What else could I do? You're going to Hagar. All right, I'll show you where to go. What more can I do? I'm telling you all this now from policy."
"And I'm calling no names," Gard remarked. "Mavering professes to have a great admiration for you as a practical practitioner. You're probably right to come along."
"Oh, I figure pretty well. I was a fool—but still, that thing was figured pretty well. I'd have won out finally all right if—"
"I object to what you have in mind to say—prefer to think you wouldn't 'have won out finally, if—' Better not speculate. We'll call that a stipulation."
Map lifted his brows and settled himself more comfortably. A change, an expression of relief, slipped over his big, harsh-boned face, the only sign of the tension that he had been under.
"Stipulations—that's what I want. If there's anything to be done to restore amiability, good God! it's surely my part to do it."
Gard looked out of the window and was silent.
Green meadows and brown fallows moving past, white houses under aged maples, hills of climbing pasture lands and pale-green forests. Did men carry any sullen burdens in this valley? Better drop them and go unburdened into Hagar.
"I suppose there might be a sort of public duty involved," he said, "which interests me just now about to the extent of an empty medicine bottle. I flung the last one at Mrs. Mavering's black cook. You remember Sabrina? You couldn't even break glass on her. Do you think of taking up regularly with—I beg your pardon—with a criminal career?"
"Criminal! A criminal's a fool. I'm no fool, or never was before. I lost my head. That's only once. Criminal! Why, look here! What do you make out of this world you and I have been shovelling dirt in now some years? Isn't every man in it for himself and against his neighbor, if his neighbor's in his way—which he partly is, always? Do people go into society to amuse themselves or each other? Themselves, of course. And business is competition, and competition's private war according to rules of custom. I'm supposed to be a lawyer. That's a succession of jobs at beating somebody else and getting paid for it. This civil war is one collection of private interests against another collection. The South was getting beaten in business—held a losing hand—wanted to break up the game. That meant a fight. Take you and me. You wouldn't let me out of this if you saw anything more in it. You don't see anything more in it. I don't, either. I'd do exactly the same, for the same reason. Never shove a man farther than you need to make your point. I don't compete with you any more in anything. I keep out of your way and avoid offence. For the rest, I compete. The law is an artificial line. The line is moved now and then. At one time it's criminal to lend money at interest and innocent to fight a duel. Another, it's the other way. That's all right. But a man's a fool not to fight inside the line as it happens to stand. There's room enough."
Gard thought he saw some of his own philosophies in caricature. They looked unlovely enough in caricature. Map was an interesting man. If peculiar, it was rather that his mind was so sharp-edged, unqualifying, absolute. It refused to see shades. It saw hard outlines and felt the impact of surfaces. Gard thought that at one time he would have found him still more interesting and would not have felt this repulsion from him. Probably convalescence was a fastidious state. He turned away to the window. There was a domed mountain in sight, its spurs thrust forward into the valley, sides covered partly with a young-leaved forest, partly with pine and hemlock, and its bald, rocky head bare in the sunlight. The train stopped at a little station by the river. The old, battered stage rolled them away slumberously over an echoing covered bridge, across the valley bottom lands, where the zigzag fences and the calling of the ploughman to his team, the bluebird on the zigzag fence, and the slim white birches along the mountain spurs all seemed in the same concord with the ancient earth and childlike sky. The silent, misanthropic stage-driver looked the kin of the country-side's slow vegetation.
The road swung around the mountain and went up through a dim green avenue of pines and hemlocks, and below, in its bowldered crypts and gorges, poured a stream with white foam and mysterious song, or sometimes lay still in black pools. The steep slope of the mountain was on the left. The road climbed steadily, and came out of the woods at last not a mile from the village in a cup of the hills of Hagar.
At the cross-roads Morgan stepped out and Gard followed.
"The house is behind the church there." Morgan said, shortly, and moved to walk away, but stopped and turned half around when Gard spoke, listening with his mouth set and yellow brows drawn low.
"I dare say you'll succeed, you and your philosophy," said Gard, slowly, looking towards the church and the house behind it. "I dare say I sha'n't, in that way—or care to, very much. Competition doesn't seem to me worth while."
Morgan was silent. The battered stage had rolled away down the hill to the post-office, where Mr. Paulus came out for the mail, and Thaddeus Bourn followed after him. Thaddeus looked up the hill, dropped the iron point of his cane on the stone step with a click, and stared blankly. Mr. Paulus, mail-bag in hand, stopped and followed the direction of Thaddeus's eyes. The stage-driver climbed down from his seat and joined them.
"I don't care," Gard continued, "a blank cartridge what you did or tried to do. There's no stipulation except that we keep out of each other's way. Is that satisfactory?"
"That's all right." Morgan hesitated, and brought out with apparent effort: "You'd better look in the cemetery first; I saw something there," went his way with long strides, and disappeared down the first dip on the Cattle Ridge road.
"There's a cemetery, very true," Gard thought, and went towards it, past the minister's picket fence and neat gate to where the mournful hemlocks stood in meditation. And there some one in a black dress was kneeling and planting flowers over a new grave, and near by was a tall, gray stone, and thereon, graven in large letters:
"SIMON BOURN,
"BORN —— DIED ——
"REMEMBER ME."
Morgan swung along, and looked not to right or left, nor cared if any villager speculated on the singular sight of "one of the Map boys" observably bound for the square house on the hill; past the mill where Job Mather watched his slow millstones, past the mill-pond, the blacksmith's, and the rambling, low farm-house that hived innumerable Durfeys, through the stone pillars of Squire Map's gate, up to the square house on the hill.
The door was locked. He rang the bell, and waited some time. The place seemed half deserted, unkept, the walks littered with last year's rotting leaves.
The door opened suddenly and Squire Map nearly filled it with broad, bowed shoulders.
"I've lost her, dad."
"Come in, Morgan."
The latter followed into the dining-room and they sat down. Opposite him on the wall was the portrait of his mother in her bridal-dress. A stately lady always, somewhat cold. She seemed to wear her bridal-veil as a kind of drapery for her pride. Morgan spread his large hands on the table and looked at them.
"I played like hell for it."
"No doubt. Go on."
He told his story coolly and without omission.
"I suppose you are a worse man than your brother," said the squire at last. "He is more scrupulous. I liked you better. You have more candor, carry more weight. I have not been a scrupulous man."
Morgan was looking at the portrait.
"What did you want me to lose for? You won."
"Won! No, I lost. So will you, soon or late. Better soon than late." He followed Morgan's eyes. "Your mother—I'd as lief she'd have died twenty years earlier."
"This sort of thing is futile, dad. Why don't you come out of your shell? Come and get into the push again."
"What for? From my standpoint and my age, Morgan, ask yourself—What for?"
Morgan laughed, lifted his fists, and let them fall with a crash on the table.
"I'm young yet."
"Oh, there's a great deal in that. But one draws no interest from time. You live on your capital. But there's much in being at the beginning instead of at the end—a great deal in that."
Chapter XXIII
The End
"It is this way," said Thaddeus, "to speak from a—a—personal standpoint. If Morgan Map goes to the cemetery I shall not wait for my mail, but go and—a—accidentally interrupt. If he goes north, the other man may go there, if he chooses. I shall wait for my mail."
"Your standpoint!" said Mr. Paulus, heavily. "Well—speakin' from young Map's, what might he want in the cemetery? Speakin' from mine, I'd rather he'd go there and stay."
"My niece Helen is at present planting flowers in the cemetery—in point of fact, roots."
Mr. Paulus was aroused. "They might do some buttin'—think?"
"Gals! Shucks!" The stage-driver climbed back to his seat and drove away. Mr. Paulus looked after him, musingly.
"Willard Sickles," he said, "never would have nothin' to do with women. He was born drivin' mails!"
"Pun?" asked Thaddeus, delicately, with his eyes on the Four Corners. "Pun, Peter?"
"Hey?" Mr. Paulus was still thoughtful—abstracted. "Lonesome and disgusted. Born so. It's his nature."
The two at the Four Corners separated. Morgan went north, Gard towards the cemetery.
"I thought they might do some buttin'," said Mr. Paulus, as one grown used to disappointment, and went in with his mail-bags.
Sundry villagers appeared, drifting slowly to the focus of the post-office. Thaddeus took off his glasses and put them with precision into their case.
"I wonder if Pete intended a pun? Probably not. Conversation is subject to accidents. It is a pity that conversation is not—not more secure."
Gard entered the cemetery-gate and went along the shrub-bordered path.
"Every man is the dungeon of himself, but there is a key that unlocks mine."
He stepped from the path into the grass, and Helen's apron was full of a mess of brown, earthy roots. She started and cried out, and held up both hands to him, with the trowel in one of them.
"I don't like my life, Nellie. Won't you let me into yours?" And she dropped the trowel and said, "Oh—why, yes," in a tone that sounded like an after-climax, and Gard took apron, yellow head, and all into his arms, and scattered the roots beside Widow Bourn's placid grave and Simon's stone, on which was graven insistently, "Remember Me." A bluebird warbled and cooed to himself on the fence and paid no attention. The bold head of Windless Mountain glimmered in the sun, that swung low and near it. Presently the shadow of Windless would sweep over Hagar with noiseless rush, with silence, or the sleepy twittering of day-birds.
"It was a long way here, Nellie. I went nearly to the other end of everything to find the path."
"Do you really love me? How long?"
"Long before I knew it. Do you mean how long am I going to?"
"No, I don't. Look, Gard! These will be blue violets when they grow. They come from behind the church, and mother liked them. But you belong to me now, and you mustn't stay here. It's cold under the hemlocks. You must come out in the sun."
They went back along the path to the gate. Over the fence in his garden the minister was planting peas, arranging them according to some theory of fitness, perhaps allegorically, and humming a hymn out of tune. Knowing that a tune was a spiritual mystery which Providence did not permit him ever thoroughly to penetrate, he only sang when he thought himself alone, and in a subdued murmur. The weather-vane of the militant church pointed southwest at Windless Mountain, which meant always a benevolent opinion about the weather. The sun slipped behind the mountain, and the shadow of Windless flowed over Hagar; over Rachel standing at the lilac gate, waiting for Helen, and liking the impersonal peace of the hour; over Thaddeus stepping up the hill from the post-office, and formulating certain reflections on the use and abuse of accident in the practice of conversation; over Helen and Gard.
"You must learn all about Hagar, Gard. That's the minister. He always pats his peas on the head when he plants them. And that's Windless."
"Is that Windless? He looks like a gentleman. Let's call the minister and let him pat us on the head, show him it's a world of kisses so he'll know what the trouble is, and tell him to ring the bell to-morrow."
"Nonsense. Besides, if you're going to do that, I'd rather only Windless saw."
"You'll be famous and glorious, won't you? And I'll be proud—"
"Proud in a tower?"
"Oh, anywhere. Properly proud like Windless. But we'll like best to be in Hagar, because that will be home."
"I'll be something, or try to be, if you want it. I'm a tired soldier now, Nellie, on sick leave. I told the adjutant I was in love, too, but he wouldn't put it in the permit. Let's go home."
They went up past the militant church, and Thaddeus and Rachel waited, smiling, at the gate under the lilacs. Simon's epitaph and the fading mountain were left facing each other across the dusk. In any issue between them, the dignity of law and time seemed to be with the mountain as against the personal claim, yet one did not come to Hagar to learn among its twilights that humanity was degenerate nature, or that the instinct of its insistent identity was lawless; it might be an amendment in the process of making.
"They're coming," said Thaddeus. "The older I grow, Mrs. Mavering, the more I perceive a certain dexterity in the—in fact, in event; a shell now, for instance, skilfully exploded."
Rachel only smiled and threw open the gate.