Francis Lynde

“ Connie promised and let him go. But in the stronger light of the hall she saw how really ill he looked, and was remorsefully repentant, after her kind.
Lansdale left the house in Colfax Avenue with an unanalyzed sense of levitation, which made him feel as though he were walking upon air; but when he had accounted for the phenomenon he came to earth again with disheartening celerity. What had a man in whose daily walk death was a visible presence to do with the tumult of gladsome suggestion evoked by a few words of sympathy from a compassionate young woman with a winsome face and innocent eyes? ”

“ Can't you begin to believe in yourself again? I believe in you."
"You!—but you don't know what you are saying, Miss Elliott. See!"—his coat was buttoned to the chin, tramp-wise, and he tore it open to show her the rags that underlay it—"do you understand now? I have pawned the shirt off my back—not to satisfy the cravings of hunger, but to feed a baser passion than that of the most avaricious miser that ever lived. Do I make it plain that I am not worthy of your sympathy, or of Richard Bartrow's?" ”

“ And as for the apparent determination to die open-eyed and militant behind the barricade, the unromantic truth again steps in to give the coup de grace to the disappointed unities. There is a limit to human endurance, and the hardiest soldier may find it on a field as yet no more than half won. Fastings and fierce hurryings, wounds, physical and spiritual, and ruthless determination may ride roughshod over Nature's turnpike; but Nature will demand her toll. For this cause Jeffard saw no more than the first flight of moon-arrows glancing from the face of the western cliff. ”

“ One sees plenty of misery in the ordinary course of things without making a specialty of looking for it; and when you've done everything that your money and sympathy can do, it is only a single drop in the great ocean of human wretchedness, after all. More than that, you have added to the sum total of the world's suffering by just so much as the miseries of the others hurt you through your compassion."
[37]
"Myra, dear, if I didn't know that you are better than your theories, I should try to humble you. What will you do if the evil day ever comes to you?" ”

“ Connie and Dick were at the door, announcing the bread and butter and tea, and Myra's handkerchief became a convenient mask for the moment. A less simple-hearted man than the old pioneer might have suspected the sincerity of such tears as may be wiped away at a word, leaving no trace behind them; but Elliott was too child-like to know aught of the fine art of dissimulation, and he took Myra's sudden return to cheerfulness as a tribute to his own astuteness in yielding a point at the critical moment. ”

“ There were lights in the house, and an air of owner's occupancy about the place; and on the veranda a big man was tramping solidly up and down, with the red spark at the end of his cigar appearing and disappearing as he passed and repassed the windows.
Jeffard saw the man and saw him not. The memory-plow had gone deeper, and the winter night changed places with a June morning, with the sun shining aslant on the wide veranda, and a young woman in a belted house-gown with loose sleeves tiptoeing on the arm of a clumsy chair while she caught up the new growth of a climbing rose. ”

“ El Reposo is a bald mountain, and its tonsure is fringed with a heavy forest growth which stops abruptly at timber-line. Halfway to the head of the gulch the new trail ended in a tangle of fallen trees,—the débris of an ancient snowslide,—and much valuable time was lost in skirting the obstacle. Bartrow glanced over his shoulder from time to time, and finally said, "There it comes, with a vengeance!"
The exclamation was ill-timed. Myra turned and stopped to watch the fleecy curtain of vapor shrouding the great bald summit they had just quitted. Bartrow sought to possess his soul in patience. ”

“ The news of Lansdale's death came with the shock of the unexpected to the dwellers in the metamorphosed cabin on the upslope of Topeka Mountain, albeit no one of the three of them had ventured to hope for anything more than a reprieve as the outcome of the jaunt afield. But the manner of his death at the time when the reprieve seemed well assured was responsible for the shock and its sorrowful aftermath; and if Constance grieved more than Bartrow or her cousin, it was only for the reason that the heart of compassion knows best the bitterness of infruition. ”

“ Bartrow tossed the extinct pipe through an open window, and began to pace the length of the slab-floored porch. It was not in him to give up without another struggle; a final struggle, he called it, though none knew better that there is no final struggle for a strong man save that which crowns perseverance with the chaplet of fruition. The temptation to grasp the hand held out to him was very subtle. If Miss Van Vetter could have been eliminated—if only the proposal had come direct from the Philadelphia capitalist, instead of through her. ”

“ Was it a softening memory of the loving-kindnesses of one James Garvin to a man soul-sick and body-wasted, snatched as a charred brand out of a fire of his own kindling? Or was it the stirring of a ruthless devil of self; a devil never more than dormant in any heart insurgent; a fell demon of the pit whose arousing waits only upon opportunity, whose power is to transform pity into remorseless ingratitude and ruth into relentless greed? ”

“ After Constance had gone, Jeffard had an exceedingly bad half-hour. For a time he tramped up and down the deserted corridor, calling himself hard names and likening his latest obliquity to whatsoever unpardonable sin has been recorded against the most incorrigible of mankind. Love had its word, also—outraged love, acknowledged only to be openly flouted and spat upon; for one may neither do violence to a worthy passion, nor give rein to an unworthy, without paying for it, blow for blow. ”

“ Lansdale smiled intelligence. "I know the taste of it, and it's bad medicine—for the soul as well as for the body," he rejoined. "There is reason to suspect that Shakespeare never went hungry, else he wouldn't have said, 'Sweet are the uses of adversity.' They're not sweet; they're damnably bitter. A man may come forth of the winepress with bones unbroken and insight sharpened to the puncturing point; but his capacity for evil will be increased in just proportion."
"I don't want to believe that," said Jeffard, whose despair was not yet proof against a good meal in good company. ”

“ Jeffard arranged them in a symmetrical row in front of him, and began to play with the singleness of purpose which is the characteristic of that particular form of dementia.
It was the old story with the usual variations. He lost, won, and then lost again until he could reckon his counters by units. After which the tide turned once more, and the roar of its flood dinned in [14] his ears like the drumming of a tornado in a forest. His capital grew by leaps and bounds, doubling, trebling, and finally quadrupling the sum he had handed the banker. ”

“ Ten seconds later the trail is regained and the summit of the pass cuts the sky-line above him. Ten other flying leaps and a resolute man may hold an [221] army at bay. But in the midst of them comes a clatter of hoofs on the rocky headland across the gulch, and a nerve-melting instant wherein the hoof-beats cease and the bleak heights give back a muffled echo in the rarefied air. The hunted one bends to the saddle-horn at the crack of the rifle, and the bullet sings high. ”

“ In his westward sweep over the Titanic playground of farther Colorado, the sun looks down into a narrow valley through which tumbles a brawling stream whose waters, snow-born within rifle-shot, go to swell the canyoned flood of the Gunnison River. Fir-clad mountains, sombre green to timber-line and fallow dun or dazzling white above it, according to the season, stand like a cordon of mighty sentinels around and about; and the foot of civilized man treading the sward of the park-like valley must first have measured many weary miles of the mountain wilderness. ”

“ The athletic one rises and stretches till his joints crack. "Been asleep, have you? So have I. There's no opiate in the world like a day's tramping in the altitudes. Freshen you up any?"
"As to body, yes. But I've had a curious dream—if it were a dream." Silence while the sob of the river rises and falls on the night wind, and then a half-hesitant query. "Jeffard, do you believe in presentiments?"
The bearded one is on his knees before the fire, pressing a live coal into the bowl of his pipe, and the answer is delayed. ”

“ Jeffard now, Dick? Are we all mistaken? or is he the hardened cynic he seems to be?"
Bartrow did not reply on the spur of the moment, as was his custom. When he had reasoned it out, he said:—
"I think we ought to break away from the notion [354] that a man has got to be either all angel or all devil. Jeffard's a human man, like the rest of us. He's done some good things that I know of,—and one pretty bad one; and it's the bad one that is setting the pace for him just now. But, as I once said to Lansdale, I'm betting on the finish. One bad curve needn't spoil a whole railroad." ”

“ In the heart of the valley the heights are heavily wooded, and the sombre greens wall out the world to the sky-line; but farther on bald slopes and ridges stretch away above the pines and firs, and the blue arch of the firmament springs clear from snow-capped abutments of fallow dun and weathered gray.
In the upper levels of the valley the disused trail leaves the stream and begins to climb by loops and zigzags to the pass. ”

“ Even as he spoke the roar deepened until the vibration of it shook the solid earth, and a dark mass of water, turbid and débris-laden, shot from the head of the gulch and swept down the ravine. Bartrow lived an anguished lifetime in an instant of hesitation. To save the woman he loved was to sacrifice Constance. To help Connie first was to take the desperate chance that Myra would be safe till he could reach her. ”

“ A little way beyond the peopled walks the church bells began to ring out clear and melodious on the frosty air, and he remembered what the uncalendared journey had made him forget; that it was Sunday. Pacing thoughtfully, with the transit-hum of the city behind him and the quiet house-streets ahead, and the plow still shearing the sod of the fallow field, he wondered if Constance Elliott [409] would be among the churchgoers. It was an upflash of the old cynicism which prompted the retort that it was improbable; that the Christianity for which she stood was not found in the churches. ”

“ Constance watched him with her heart in a turmoil of doubt and fear. The doubt was of her own making, as the fear was of his. She had thought that this man was known to her, in his potentialities for good or evil, in his stumblings upon the brink of the abyss, and in his later plunge into the depths of wrongdoing; but now that she was brought face to face with him, her prefigurings took new shapes and she feared to look upon them. For the potentialities had suddenly become superhuman, and [362] love itself stood aghast at the possibilities. ”

“ Jeffard's tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. Frantic plunges into the nether depths are not conducive to good health, moral or physical, and nature was exacting the inevitable penalty. For three days he had been fighting a losing battle with an augmenting army of ills, and but for the rough heartening of his companion he would have fallen by the wayside more than once during the breath-cutting march over the mountain passes. Wherefore his answer to Garvin's question was the babblement of despair. ”

“ It was an unequal fight at best, since hunger was the besieger, but Jeffard made shift to prolong it until the long day of fasting was drawing to its close. He yielded at last, as needs must when famine drives, but the capitulation was upon conditions, and his heart was soft with repentant kneadings. Since one must eat to live, the pride-quenching thing must come to pass; but the doing of it should be the pivot upon which he would turn back to sanity and industrious thrift. ”

“ Thinking of nothing but that he should acquit himself as a man before the woman he loved, he flung himself upon the contemner of women with the vigor of a righteous cause singing in his veins like the wine of new life.
The struggle was short and decisive. In his college days Jeffard had been a man of his hands, and the fierce onset proved to be the better half of the battle. Constance caught her breath and cowered in the corner with Margaret when the two men went down together, but she gave a glad little cry when she saw that Jeffard had won the fall ”

“ They spread their luncheon on the flat-topped boulder, and fell upon it like the hungry wayfarers that they were, calling it a sky banquet, and drinking Wun Ling's health in a bottle of cold tea. With satiety came thoughts of the descent, and Myra pleaded piteously for a change of route.
"I shall never get down the way we came up in the wide, wide world,—not alive," she asserted. "With the view in prospect, I believe I could climb the Matterhorn; but getting down is quite another matter. Can't we go around some other way?"
Bartrow thought it possible ”

“ The air of the musty hallway seemed suddenly to grow suffocating, and the muffled drumming of the sewing-machine in Margaret Gannon's room jarred upon him until it drove him forth to wander hot-hearted and desperate in the streets.
Without remembering that he had crossed the viaduct or ascended the hill, he finally found himself wandering in the Highlands. Drifting aimlessly on beyond the fringe of suburban houses, he [92] came to the borders of a shallow pond what time the sun was poising for its plunge behind the upreared mountain background in the west. ”