Satan Sanderson Part 23

The doctor noted now the telltale flush on his companion's face.

"We have surprised a romance," he said, as the two unconscious figures disappeared down the curving stretch. "Who is the man?"

"He is the one we have been talking about."

The other stared. "Not your local Jekyll and Hyde, the sneak who lost his memory and found himself an honest man?"

Felder nodded. "His cabin is just below here, on the hillside."

"Good Lord!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the doctor. "What an infernal pity! What's his name?"

"Hugh Stires."

"Stires?" the other repeated. "Stires? How odd!" He stood a moment, tapping his suit-case with his stick. Suddenly he took the lawyer's arm and led him into the side-path.

"Come," he said, "I want to show you something."

He led the way quickly to the k.n.o.b, where he stopped, as much astonished as his companion, for he had known nothing of the statue. They read the words chiselled on its base. "The prodigal son," said Felder.

"Now look at the name on the headstone," said the physician.

Felder's glance lifted from the stone, to peer through the screening bushes to the cabin on the shelf below, and returned to the other's face with quick comprehension. "You think--"

"Who could doubt it? _I will arise and go unto my father._ The old man's whim to be buried here had a meaning, after all. The statue is Miss Holme's work--n.o.body in Smoky Mountain could do it--and I've seen her modelling in clay at the sanatorium. What we saw just now is the key to what might have been a pretty riddle if we had ever looked further than our noses. It's a case of a clever rascal and d.a.m.nable propinquity. The ward has fallen in love with the black sheep!"

They betook themselves down the mountain in silence, the doctor wondering how deep a hurt lay back of that instant's color on his friend's now imperturbable face, and more than disturbed on Jessica's account. Her care for the cross-grained, likable invalid had touched him.

"A fine old man to own a worthless son," he said at length, musingly. "A gentleman of the old school. Your amiable blackleg has education and good blood in him, too!"

"I've wondered sometimes," said Felder, "if the old Hugh Stires, that disreputable one that came here, wasn't the unreal one, and the Hugh Stires the town is beginning to like, the real one, brought back by the accident that took his memory. You medical men have cases of such double ident.i.ty, haven't you?"

"The books have," responded the other, "but they're like Kellner's disease or Ludwig's Angina--n.o.body but the original discoverer ever sees 'em."

As they parted at the station the doctor said: "We needn't take the town into our confidence, eh? Some one will stumble on the statue sooner or later, but we won't help the thing along." He looked shrewdly in the other's face as they shook hands.

"You know the old saying: There's as many good fish in the sea as ever were caught."

The lawyer half laughed. "Don't worry," he said. "If I had been in danger, the signal was hung out in plenty of time!"

CHAPTER x.x.xI

THE REVELATION OF HALLELUJAH JONES

Hallelujah Jones was in his element. With his wheezy melodeon, his gasoline flare and his wild earnestness, he crowded the main street of the little mining-town, making the engagement of the "San Francisco Amazons" at the clapboard "opera house" a losing venture. The effete civilization of wealthy bailiwicks did not draw forth his powers as did the open and unveneered debaucheries of less restricted settlements.

Against these he could inveigh with surety, at least, of an appreciative audience.

He had not lacked for listeners here, for he was a new sensation. His battered music-box, with its huge painted text, was far and away more attractive than the thumping pianolas of the saloons or the Brobdignagian gramophone of the dance-hall, and his old-fas.h.i.+oned songs were enthusiastically encored. When he lit his flare in the court-house square at dusk on the second evening, the office of the Mountain Valley House was emptied and the bar-rooms and gaming-tables well-nigh deserted of their patrons.

Jessica had seen the mustering crowd from the hotel entrance. Mrs.

Halloran had welcomed her errand that day and given her her best room, a chamber overlooking the street. She had persuaded her visitor to spend the afternoon and insisted that she stay to supper, "just to see how she would like it for a steady diet." Now, as Jessica pa.s.sed along toward the mountain road, the spectacle chained her feet on the outskirts of the gathering. She watched and listened with a preoccupied mind; she was thinking that on her way to the sanatorium she would cross to the cabin for a good-night word with the man upon whom her every thought centered.

As it happened, however, Harry was at that moment very near her. Alone on the mountain, the perplexing conflict of feeling had again descended upon him. He had fought it, but it had prevailed, and at nightfall had driven him down to the town, where the street preacher now held forth.

He stood alone, unnoted, a little distance away, near the court-house steps, where, by reason of the crowd, Jessica could see neither him nor the dog which sniffed at the heels of the circle of bystanders as if to inquire casually of salvation.

Numbers were swelling now, and the street preacher, shaking back his long hair, drew a premonitory, wavering chord from his melodeon, and struck up a gospel song:

"My days are gliding swiftly by, And I, a pilgrim stranger, Would not detain them as they fly, These hours of toil and danger.

For Oh, we tread on Jordan's strand, Our friends are pa.s.sing over, And just before the s.h.i.+ning sh.o.r.e We may almost discover."

The song ended, he mounted his camp-stool to propound his usual fiery text.

The watcher by the steps was gazing with a strange, alert intentness.

Something in the scene--the spluttering, dripping flame, the music, the forensic earnestness of the pilgrim--held him enthralled. The dormant sense that in the recent weeks had again and again stirred at some elusive touch of memory, was throbbing. Since last night, with its sudden lightning flash of the past that had faded again into blankness, he had been as sensitive as a photographic plate.

Hallelujah Jones knew the melodramatic value of contrast. As his mood called, he pa.s.sed abruptly from exhortation to song, from prayer to fulmination, and he embellished his harangue with anecdotes drawn from his lifelong campaign against the Arch-Enemy of Souls. Of what he had said the solitary observer had been quite unconscious. It was the _ensemble_--the repet.i.tion of something experienced somewhere before--that appealed to him. Suddenly, however, a chance phrase pierced to his understanding.

Another moment and he was leaning forward, his eyes fixed, his breath straining at his breast. For each word of the speaker now was knocking a sledge-hammer blow upon the blank wall in his brain. Hallelujah Jones had launched into the recital of an incident which had become the _chef d'ouvre_ of his repertory--a story which, though the stern charge of a bishop had kept him silent as to name and locality, yet, possessing the vividness of an actual experience, had lost little in the telling. It was the tale of an evening when he had peered through the tilted window of a chapel, and seen its dissolute rector gambling on the table of the Lord.

Back in the shadow the listener, breathless and staring, saw the scene unroll like the s.h.i.+fting slide of a stereopticon--the epitaph on his own dead self. Nerve and muscle and brain tightened as if to withstand a shock, for the man who moved through the pictures was himself! He saw the cards and counters falling on the table, the entrance of the two intruding figures, heard Hugh's wild laugh as he fled, and the grate of the key in the lock behind him as he stood in his study. He heard the rush of the wind past the motor-car, the rustle of dry corn in the hedges, and felt the mist beating on his bare head--

"Palms of Victory, Crowns of Glory!

Palms of Victory I shall wear!"

He did not know that it was the voice of the street preacher which was singing now. The words shrieked themselves through his brain. Harry Sanderson, not Hugh Stires! Not an outcast! Not criminal, thief and forger! The curtain was rent. The dead wall in his brain was down, and the real past swept over him in an ungovernable flood. Hallelujah Jones had furnished the clue to the maze. His story was the last great wave, which had crumbled, all at once, the cliff of oblivion that the normal process of the recovered mind had been stealthily undermining. The formula, lost so long in the mysterious labyrinth of the brain, had reestablished itself, and the thousand shreds of recollection that he had misconstrued had fallen into their true place in the old pattern.

Harry Sanderson at last knew his past and all of puzzlement and distress that it had held.

Shaking in every limb and feeling all along the court-house wall like a drunken man, he made his way to the further deserted street. A pa.s.ser-by would have shrunk at sight of his face and his burning eyes.

For these months, he, the Reverend Henry Sanderson, disgraced, had suffered eclipse, had been sunk out of sight and touch and hearing like a stone in a pool. For these months--through an accidental facial resemblance and a fortuitous concurrence of circ.u.mstances--he had owned the name and ignominy of Hugh Stires. And Jessica? Deceived no less than he, dating her piteous error from that mistaken moment when she had torn the bandage from her eyes on her wedding-day. She had never seen the real Hugh in Smoky Mountain. She must learn the truth. Yet, how to tell her? How could he tell her _all_?

At any hour yesterday, hard as the telling must have been, he could have told her. Last night the hour pa.s.sed. How could he tell her now? Yet she was the real Hugh's wife by law and right; he himself could not marry her! If G.o.d would but turn back the universe and give him yesterday!

Why not _be_ Hugh Stires? The wild idea came to him to throw away his own self for ever, never to tell her, never to return to Aniston, to live on here or fly to some distant place, till years had made recognition impossible. He struck his forehead with his closed hand. He, a priest of G.o.d, to summon her to an illegal union? To live a serial story of hypocrisy, with the guilty shadow of the living Hugh always between them, the sword of Damocles always suspended above their heads, to cleave to the heart of his Fool's Paradise? The mad thought died. Yet what justice of Heaven was it that Jessica, whose very soul had been broken on the wheel, should now, through no conscious fault, be led by his hand through a new Inferno of suffering?

His feet dragging as though from cold, he climbed the mountain road. As he walked he took from his pocket the little gold cross, and his fingers, numb with misery, tied it to his thong watch-guard. It had been only a bauble, a pocket-piece acquired he knew not when or how; now he knew it for the badge of his calling. He remembered now that, pressed a certain way, it would open, and engraved inside were his name and the date of his ordination.

He might shut the cabin door, but he could not forbid the torturer that came with him across the threshold. He might throw himself upon his knees and bury his face in the rough skin of the couch, but he could not shut out words that blent in golden-lettered flashes across his throbbing eyeb.a.l.l.s: _Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife_.

So he crouched, a man under whose feet life had crashed, leaving him pinned beneath the wreck, to watch the fire that must creep nearer and nearer.