Wild Wings Part 58

Finally d.i.c.k came and was able to give what Doctor Philip could not. He could sing Alan's praises, tell her how wonderful he had been, how generous and kind. He could share her grief as no one else could because he had learned to love Alan Ma.s.sey almost as well as she did herself.

d.i.c.k talked freely of Alan, told her of the strange discovery which they had made that he and Alan were cousins and that he himself was John Ma.s.sey, the kidnapped baby whom he had been so sorry for when he had looked up the Ma.s.sey story at the time of the old man's death. d.i.c.k was not an apt liar but he lied gallantly now for Alan's sake and for Tony's.

He told her that it was only since Alan had been in Mexico that he had known who his cousin was and had immediately possessed the other of the facts and turned over to him the proofs of his ident.i.ty as John Ma.s.sey.

It was a good lie, well conceived and well delivered but the liar had not reckoned on that fatal Holiday gift of intuition. Tony listened to the story, shut her eyes and thought hard for a moment. Then she opened her eyes again and looked straight at d.i.c.k.

"That is not the truth," she said. "Alan knew before he went to Mexico.

He knew long before. That was the other ghost--the one he could not lay.

Don't lie to me. I know."

And then yielding to her command d.i.c.k began again and told her the truth, serving Alan's memory well by the relation. One thing only he kept back.

After all he had no proof that the young engineer had been right in his conjecture that Alan had wanted the dagger to find him. There was no need of hurting Tony with that.

"d.i.c.k--I can't call you John yet. I can't even think about you to-night though I am so thankful to have you back safe and well. I can't be glad yet for you. I can't remember any one but Alan. You will forgive me, I know. But tell me. It was a terrible thing he did to you. Do you forgive him really?" The girl's deep shadowed eyes searched the young man's face, challenging him to speak the truth and only that.

He met the challenge willingly. He had nothing to conceal here. Tony might read him through and through and she would find in him neither hate nor rancor, nor condemnation.

"Of course I forgive him, Tony. He did a terrible thing to me you say.

He did a much more terrible thing to himself. And he made up for everything over and over by what he did for me in Mexico. He might have let me die. I should have died if he had not come. There is no doubt in the world of that. He could not have done more if he had been my own brother. He meant me to like him. He did more. He made me love him. He was my friend. We parted as friends with a handshake which was his good-by though I didn't know it."

It was a fatal speech. Too late d.i.c.k realized it as he saw Tony's face.

"d.i.c.k, he meant to let himself get killed. I've thought so all along and now I know you think so too."

"I didn't mean to let that out. Maybe I am mistaken. We shall never know.

But I believe he was not sorry to let the dagger get him. He had given up everything else. It wasn't so hard for him to give up the one thing more--the thing he didn't want anyway--life. Life wasn't much to him after he gave you up, Tony. His love was the biggest thing about him. I love you myself but I am not ashamed to say that his love was a bigger thing than mine every way, finer, more magnificent, the love of a genius whereas mine is just the love of an every day man. It was love that saved him."

"d.i.c.k, do you believe that the real Alan is dust--nothing but dust down in a grave?" demanded Tony suddenly.

"No, Tony, I don't. I can't. The essence of what was best in him is alive somewhere. I know it. It must be. His love for you--for all beauty--they couldn't die, dear. They were big enough to be immortal."

"And his dancing," sighed Tony. "His dancing couldn't die. It had a soul."

If she had not been sure already that Alan had meant to go out of her life even if he had not meant to go to his death when he left New York she would have been convinced a little later. Alan's j.a.panese servant brought two gifts to her from his honorable master according to his honorable master's orders should he not return from his journey. His honorable master being unfortunately dead his unworthy servant laid the gifts at Mees Holiday's honorable feet. Whereupon the bearer had departed as quietly as death itself might come.

One of the gifts was a picture, a painting which Tony had seen, and which was she thought the most beautiful of all his beautiful creations. Its sheer loveliness would have hurt her even if it had had no other significance and it did have a very real message.

At first sight the whole scene seemed enveloped in translucent, silver mist. As one looked more closely however there was revealed the figure of a man, black clad in pilgrim guise, kneeling on the verge of a precipitous cliff which rose out of a seemingly bottomless abyss of terrific blackness. Though in posture of prayer the pilgrim's head was lifted and his face wore an expression of rapt adoration. Above a film of fog in the heavens stretched a clear s.p.a.ce of deep blue black sky in which hung a single luminous star. From the star a line of golden light of unearthly radiance descended and finding its way to the uplifted transfigured face of the kneeling pilgrim ended there.

Tony Holiday understood, got the message as clearly as if Alan himself stood beside her to interpret it. She knew that he was telling her through the picture that she had saved his soul, kept him out of the abyss, that to the end she was what he had so often called her--his star.

With tear blinded eyes she turned from the canvas to the little silver box which the servant had placed in her hands together with a sealed envelope. In the box was a gorgeous, unset ruby, the gem of Alan's collection as Tony well knew having wors.h.i.+ped often at its shrine. It lay there now against the austere purity of its white satin background--the symbol of imperishable pa.s.sion.

Reverently Tony closed the little box and opened the sealed envelope dreading yet longing to know its contents. Alan had sent her no word of farewell, had not written to her that night before he went out into the storm to meet his death, had made no response to the letter she herself had written offering herself and her love and faith for his taking. At first these things had hurt her. But these gifts of his were beginning to make her understand his silence. Selfish and spectacular all his life at his death Alan Ma.s.sey had been surpa.s.singly generous and simple. He had chosen to bequeath his love to her not as an obsession and a bondage but as an elemental thing like light and air.

The message in the envelope was in its way as impersonal as the ruby had been but Tony found it more hauntingly personal than she had ever found his most impa.s.sioned love letter. Once more the words were couched in the symbol tongue of the poet in India--in only two sentences, but sentences so poignant that they stamped themselves forever on Tony Holiday's mind as they stood out from the paper in Alan's beautiful, striking handwriting.

"When the lighted lamp is brought into the room I shall go.

And then perhaps you will listen to the night, and hear my song when I am silent."

The lines were dated on that unforgettable night when Tony had played Broadway and danced her last dance with her royal lover. So he had known even then that he was giving her up. Realizing this Tony realized as she never had before the high quality of his love. She could guess a little of what that night had meant to him, how pa.s.sionately he must have desired to win through to the full fruition of his love before he gave her up for all the rest of time. And she herself had been mad that night Tony remembered. Ah well! He had been strong for them both. And now their love would always stay upon the high levels, never descend to the ways of earth. There would never be anything to regret, though Tony loving her lover's memory as she did that moment was not so sure but she regretted that most of all.

Yet tragic as Alan's death was and bitterly and sincerely as she mourned his loss Tony could see that he had after all chosen the happiest way out for himself as well as for her and his cousin. It was not hard to forgive a dead lover with a generous act of renunciation his last deed.

It would have been far less easy to forgive a living lover with such a stain upon his life. Even though he tried to wash it away by his surrender and she by her forgiveness the stain would have remained ineradicable. There would always have been a barrier between them for all his effort and her own.

And his love would ill have borne denial or frustration. Without her he would have gone down into dark pits if he had gone on living. Perhaps he had known and feared this himself, willing to prevent it at any cost.

Perhaps he had known that so long as he lived she, Tony, would never have been entirely her own again. His bondage would have been upon her even if he never saw her again. Perhaps he had elected death most of all for this reason, had loved her well enough to set her free. He had told her once that love was twofold, a force of destruction and d.a.m.nation but also a force of purification and salvation. Alan had loved her greatly, perhaps in the end his love had taken him in his own words "to the gate of Heaven." Tony did not know but she thought if there really was a G.o.d he would understand and forgive the soul of Alan Ma.s.sey for that last splendid sacrifice of his in the name of love.

And whatever happened Tony Holiday knew that she would bear forever the mark of Alan Ma.s.sey's stormy, strange, and in the end all-beautiful love.

Perhaps some day the lighted lamp might be brought in. She did not know, would not attempt to prophesy about that. She did not know that she would always listen to the night for Alan Ma.s.sey's sake and hear his song though he was silent forever.

The next day Richard Carson officially disappeared from the world and John Ma.s.sey appeared in his place. The papers made rather a striking story of his romantic history and its startling denouement which had come they said through the death bed confessions of the man Roberts which had only just reached the older Ma.s.sey's hands, strangely enough on the eve of his own tragic death, which was again related to make the tale a little more of a thriller. That was all the world knew, was ever to know for the Holidays and John Ma.s.sey kept the dead man's secret well.

And the gra.s.s grew green on Alan Ma.s.sey's grave. The sun and dew and rain laid tender fingers upon it and great crimson and gold hearted roses strewed their fragrant petals upon it year by year. The stars he had loved so well shone down upon the lonely spot where his body slept quiet at last after the torment of his brief and stormy life. But otherwise, as John Ma.s.sey and Tony Holiday believed, his undefeated spirit fared on splendidly in its divine quest of beauty.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

IN WHICH THE TALE ENDS IN THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

The winter had at last decided to recapture its forsaken role of the Snow King. For two days and as many nights the air had been one swirl of snow which shut out earth and sky. But on the third morning the Hill woke to a dazzling world of cloudless blue and trackless white. A resplendent bride-like day it was and fitly so for before sundown the old House on the Hill was to know another bride. Elinor Ruth Farringdon's affairs required her immediate attention in Australia and she was leaving to-night for that far away island which was again now dear to her heart as the home of her happy childhood, the memory of which had now all returned after months of strange obliteration. But she would not go as Elinor Ruth Farringdon. That name was to be shed as absolutely as her recollection of it had once been shed. She would go as Mrs. Laurence Holiday with a real wedding ring all her own and a real husband also all her own by her side.

There were to be no guests outside the family except for the Lamberts, Carlotta and d.i.c.k--John Ma.s.sey, as they were now trying to learn to call him. The wedding was to be very quiet not only because of Granny but because they were all very pitiful of Tony's still fresh grief, the more so because she bore it so bravely and quietly, anxious lest she cast any shadow upon the happiness of the others, especially that of Larry and Ruth. In any case a quiet wedding would have been the choice of the two who were most concerned. They wanted only their near and dear about them when they took upon themselves the rites which were to unite them for the rest of their two lives.

Aside from Tony's sorrow the only two regrets which marred the household joy that bride white day were Ted's absence and imminent departure for France and that other even soberer remembrance of that other gallant young soldier, Ruth's brother Roderick of whom no news had come, though Ruth insisted that Rod wasn't dead, that he would came back just as her vivid memory of him had returned.

And it happened that her faith was rewarded and on the very day of days when one drop more of happiness made the cup fairly spill over. Larry was summoned to the telephone just as he had been once before on a certain memorable occasion to be told that a cabled message awaited him. The message was from Geoffrey Annersley and bore besides his love and congratulations the wonderful news that Roderick Farringdon had escaped from a German prison camp and was safe in England.

Ruth shed many happy tears over this best of all bridal gifts, not enough to dim the s.h.i.+ning blue of her eyes but enough to give them a lovely, misty tenderness which made her sweeter than ever Larry thought, and who should have magic eyes if not a bridegroom?

A little later came Carlotta and d.i.c.k, the latter well and strong again but thin and pale and rather sober. Tony loved him for grieving for Alan as she knew he did. He too had known and loved the dead man and understood him perhaps better than she had herself. For after all no man and woman can ever fully understand each other especially if they are in love. So many faint nuances of doubt and fear and pride and pa.s.sion and jealousy are forever drifting between lovers obscuring clarity of vision.

Carlotta was prettier than ever with a new sweetness and womanliness which her love had wrought in her during the year. People who had known her mother said she was growing daily more like Rose though always before they had traced a greater resemblance to the other side of the house, to her Aunt Lottie particularly. She and Philip were to be married in the spring. "When the orioles come" Carlotta had said remembering her father's story of that other brief mating.

Tony and Carlotta slipped away from the others to talk by themselves. Carlotta too had known and liked Alan and to all such Tony clung just now.

"He was so different at the end," she said to her friend. "I wish you could have known him that way--so dear and gentle and wonderful. He kept his promise everyway, lived absolutely straight and clean and fine."

"He did it for you, Tony. He never could have done it for himself. He wouldn't have thought it worth while. Don't tell me if you don't want to but I have guessed a good many things since I knew about d.i.c.k and I have wondered if he wasn't rather glad--to get killed."

"Yes, d.i.c.k thinks and I think too that he let the dagger find him. I have always called him my royal lover. His death was the most royal part of all."

Carlotta was silent. She hoped that somewhere Alan was finding the happiness he seemed always to have missed on earth. Then seeing her friend's lovely eyes with the heavy shadow in them where there had been only suns.h.i.+ne before her heart rebelled. Poor Tony! Why must she suffer like this? She was so young. Was life really over for her? For Carlotta in her own happiness life and love were synonymous terms. Something of what was in her mind she said to her friend.

"I don't know," confessed Tony. "It is too soon to tell. Just now Alan fills every nook and cranny of me. I can't think of any other man or imagine myself loving anybody else as I loved him. But I am a very much alive person. I don't believe I shall give myself to death forever. Alan himself wouldn't want it so. A part of me will always be his but there are other margins of me that Alan never touched and these maybe I shall give to some one else when the time comes."