The Song of the Wolf Part 29

A few skillful strokes of the scalpel and he nodded his satisfaction.

"Merely a scalp wound with a slight depression of the parietal bone," he said rea.s.suringly. "It will require trephining but that is at the worst only a minor operation. As soon as the pressure on the brain is relieved he will recover consciousness. The bullet did not penetrate the skull at all, being deflected by its acute angle of impact. It was an exceedingly close call, but in six weeks he will never know he was shot at all, provided no unforeseen complications arise."

A half hour later Dougla.s.s opened his eyes. His vision was still uncertain and he blinked uncomprehendingly at the white faces about him.

Then he caught sight of the woman kneeling at the bedside in an agony of thanksgiving, her face hidden in her hands. He half rose from the table where he was lying and held out his arms pleadingly through the mists that clouded brain and eyes alike:

"Gracie, sweetheart, forgive--!"

As he fell back fainting in the arms of the irate doctor, who was taken unawares by his patient's unexpected action, and who was savagely cursing his own remissness in not having strapped him to the table, the woman rose from her knees and with one hand pressed to her heart, tottered unsteadily towards the door. Ballard, springing to her a.s.sistance, recoiled at the hopeless despair and misery written on that face. At the threshold she hesitated a moment, steadying herself with one hand braced against the casing. Then of a sudden she turned and walked firmly to the table; disregarding the surgeon's indignant remonstrance, she leaned over the unconscious man and laid her lips on his. For a full minute she held them there, her form as motionless as his, then with the slowness of one who is wearied unto death, she raised her head and stood with closed eyes beside him.

The men's faces were averted and their heads bowed as she went silently out. For not a one of them but was fully conversant with her relations to Dougla.s.s, and one of them at least knew of his engagement to Grace Carter.

But all of them were awed by the tragedy of this woman's misspent love, all reverently silenced by the atoning sacrifice offered up in that heart-breaking kiss of renunciation.

A week later when Dougla.s.s had regained full consciousness he was informed that Mr. and Mrs. Brevoort had returned to New York. He felt not a little hurt at her unceremonious departure without a word of farewell to him and was inclined to be morose and splenetic during the succeeding fortnight of convalescence. From Red McVey he had learned of Grace's departure on the day of his mishap, and was much relieved to know that she was probably unaware of his injury at the time of leaving, it being very doubtful if she had even heard of it up to the present time; her foreign address being unknown to any of her western friends, there had been no interchange of correspondence, and local happenings of this nature were not of sufficient Interest to the eastern public to receive insertion in the New York papers. At least that is what he thought, forgetting that a robbery of the mails is an item of universal interest and also overlooking the fact that he was now a millionaire, whose attempted a.s.sa.s.sination by a ringleader of the desperadoes had been the welcome justification for glaring scare-heads in all the metropolitan dailies. It would have cut him to the quick had she been cognizant of his trouble and evinced no interest. He was also cynically resentful of Constance's apparent defection, ungenerously attributing it to her fear of being compromised.

Imagine his contrition when Ballard one day sought him out and delivered unto him an envelope addressed in Constance's familiar dainty chirography, admitting its detention for over three weeks by her express command.

"I was not to give it to you until you were fairly off the puny list,"

said the marshal gravely, "and there is something else that you should know before you read that letter."

And he proceeded to relate without any embellishment the facts in the matter of Matlock's taking off, supplementing them with other details of interest to the man who sat for hours after his friend had gone in bitter self-communion. It was quite dark when he went supperless to his room and opened the cream-tinted envelope.

The hours came and pa.s.sed unrecked, and the gray dawn found him still sitting by the rickety little table, head in hands, poring dully over the lines that to his disordered fancy seemed written in her heart's blood.

"I am going away to-morrow, out into the pitiful Nothing in which all things end; and soon I will be even less than a memory to you.

It is best so, for I would not have you hampered by a single regret in your enjoyment of the happiness that the future holds for you.

"You owe me nothing, although I have given you all--and gloried in the giving. For you at least vouchsafed me, through barred windows, a glimpse into the sanctuary where such as I may not enter. I realize now that it was impossible for me to have ever entered into the holy of holies; and yet, dear, can you blame me for hoping?

"I know now that I could never have entered fully into your life; the clay of my being leans too awry for that. But am I to blame for the shaking of the Potter's hand? I sought with all the a.s.siduity of a weak woman's love, but there was a door to which I never found the key, a veil behind which I could not peer. Yet to me was given the rapture of the outer temple--and it was the bread of life.

"Be generous to me in this, the hour of my bitter atonement, and believe that my love was as pure and unselfish as it is possible for a woman to give. The proof of it is that I am giving you up now when I know that by a little finesse I could pull you down to h.e.l.l with me. For I have spilled the Red Wine for you, my Wolf, and the reek of it would have been a bond and heel-rope between us.

"It is because of my love for you that I am giving you up, giving you into the hands of another woman. I have been but a flame to you, burning out the dross from your nature so that she might pour into her heart's crucible only the pure gold. G.o.d grant she mold the chalice aright.

"And now farewell while I have yet strength to say it. Forget me if you can. But if from the heights you ever look backward and downward, and in the sea of memory catch one faint reflection of me, let the thought be a kindly one.

"For oh, Man, who was more than G.o.d to me, I loved you too well!"

Very reverently he kissed the letter, then burned it in the flame of the smoky lamp. It was a long and weary ride to the nearest telegraph office at Gunnison, yet he never dismounted from his staggering horse until he heard the clicking of the sounders in the dingy little office.

"My life is yours alone," he wrote firmly; "let me make amends. Will you mold the chalice?"

Feverishly he strode up and down his apartment at the hotel until her answering wire was laid in his hand:

"You are even more n.o.ble than I thought, and shall have your reward.

Grace waits you at Cairo. Have written her all that she must ever know.

Go at once and G.o.d bless you both!"

He left that night for the East, and at the house of the Brevoorts learned that Mr. Brevoort and his wife had taken their departure two days before on an extended tour of the Orient. Yes, Mrs. Brevoort had left an enclosure for him.

It contained only a little note from Grace Carter to Constance and in his misery he could not understand why the latter had urged him to go to Cairo:

"I forgive you, even as I think G.o.d has forgiven you," Grace wrote, "for I, too, have been whirled in the maelstrom of his irresistible pa.s.sion.

I do not presume to sit in judgment of you, for you have given him his life--and at what an awful price! May G.o.d grant you forgetfulness, the boon that has been denied me."

Underneath this was written in Mrs. Carter's angular hand:

"I found this on my daughter's table the day after she was stricken down by brain fever, and an investigation of her correspondence shows it to have been intended for you. Now that the danger is pa.s.sed and she is on the way to recovery, I send it to you with my contempt. Deem yourself fortunate that it is not my curse, instead."

On the forward deck of the great ocean grayhound that was cleaving the waters at record speed, a man stood that night with his face turned ever to the East. It would be ten days more before he could kiss the hem of her garment in supplication, ten days of h.e.l.l in whose torturing fires his soul shriveled with a sickening fear.

If he had lost her, after all!

CHAPTER XXIII

BELSHAZZAR COMES BACK TO STAY

In her apartments at the Grand Hotel de Esbekie-yeh in Cairo, a wan-faced girl was looking wearily out over the splendid panorama spread before her. In the heel of the afternoon the level rays of the sun were gilding parti-colored minarets of mosque and palaces with barbaric splendor. In the distance the s...o...b..ah palaces gleamed even more fairy-like than usual; the Abbasieyeh camps were astir with multi-hued life, and on its frowning rock the distant citadel was a gem in red bronze.

On the bosom of the world's most mysterious river, the brown sails were gleaming like the wings of great birds, and insh.o.r.e the graceful lateens under the dipping shadoofs were closely folded as they lay at rest. Over beyond Ghizeh loomed the Pyramids which she was to visit on the morrow, the Sphinx in its majesty between. It was fairyland, in truth, the most gorgeous riot of color and mystery in the whole world, and yet she saw it not. The languorous air was heavy almost to oppression with the blended odor of jasmine, orange, citron, and the thousand and one flowers of the myriad gardens, mingled with the reek of the bazaars and the indescribable breath of the Nile. And yet she was all unconscious of it.

For in the nostrils of her introspection there was only the spicy tang of lemonias and sagebrush, and the eyes of her soul saw only a little glade embowered with artemesia and clematis, nestled deep in the forbidding cleft in the Rocky Mountains, many thousand miles away. A glade where lay a dead man with the snarl of baffled hatred petrified on his discolored lips, and another wounded almost to death, his head clasped close to the bosom of a woman whom she should be logically hating as woman was never hated before.

And yet in the heart of her there was only pity for the woman, whose letter lay in her lap. For the hundredth time she read the tear-stained words, feeling a new accession of tenderness at each transcribed sob:

"Yesterday, at the 'horse-shoe bend' in Lost Canon, I killed the man called Jasper Matlock, after he had shot Kenneth Dougla.s.s from ambush. Mr. Dougla.s.s was not injured seriously, but at the time I thought him dead. Somehow I found his revolver in my hands and the man was making a second attempt.

"Mr. Ballard--ah, the great hearts of these westerners--magnanimously sought to s.h.i.+eld me from the consequences and publicity. As though all the publicity in the world mattered now.

"I have wronged you, but in one thing only: the lie about your engagement to Ellerslie. That was my doing. In everything else I had the justification of every law of Nature; I loved him far better than you could ever do, and he was logically mine if I could but win him. I was ready and eager to sacrifice all, while you in your pitiful selfishness and egotism turned from the glory laid at your feet and yielded him nothing. Oh, you fool! You poor, weak fool! To deny him even the small a.s.surance of your vain little body, when you should have found, as I did, ecstatic exaltation in letting him trample on my soul.

"Oh! child, in your wealth of possession be generous and give me a little of your kindness, a little of your forgiveness. I have so little, so little of him. I know now that I have never even had his respect, at times barely his tolerance. And, G.o.d help me, I loved him so. Can you understand when I say that I love him even the more that he was always greater than the manifold arts I exercised upon him? That all my sacrifices, my tenderness, my adoration gave him out apathetic amus.e.m.e.nt? I was ever but a toy to divert him from the agony your neglect caused him and any other woman as fair would have sufficed as well.

"To my shame be it said that I knew it all the time; but I was hoping against hope. To-day I go away from here, and from him, forever. He will come to you as certainly as the iron flies to the magnet, and he will be suffering, penitent and purified. My share of him has been the coa.r.s.e dross of pa.s.sion that must be skimmed from the crucible of every strong man's hot heart; yours will be the refined gold of his soul's first and last real love. For G.o.d's sake, child, play with happiness no more, lest you lose it as I have done.

"In the bitterness of the days to come it would lessen the pain if I thought you could ever come to forgive me. I can see to write no more. Mayhap these tears will in time wash out the stain on my soul. That on my hands I must see forever. It is the visible proof of my atonement, for by it I gave back his life to you."

The paper was wet with her tears as she thrust it into the bosom of her dress. Beside the open window she knelt and prayed for the peace of a troubled soul. But it could never be--this home-coming of her lost love.

Her heart, too, was dead; the feet of her idol had crumbled and the glorious fabric of her dreams was dust. The yellow drifting sands of the Libyan desert s.h.i.+mmering before her aching eyes were no more dry and lifeless than the dead love moldering In her heart. Never again would her pulses leap at the sound of his voice or her senses reel at his touch. That was as much a thing of the past as Thebes, Luzor, Karnak and Athor out yonder, a dead thing buried in the ashes of a murdered hope.

Over in the aridity of the eternal desert, where for ages she had watched in contemptuous silence the petty tragedies enacted on the worn old stage of Life by the gibbering puppets who call themselves Man, the woman-breasted Sphinx, touched by the shadow of a pa.s.sing cloud, smiled cynically into the vacancy of the everlasting East.

Two hours after her carriage had entered the airline avenue from Ghizeh to the Pyramids, the incoming train from Alexandria bore into the composite Bedlam called "Masr el Kahira" a bronzed young American at sight of whom more than one _yashmak_ fluttered eagerly as its dark-eyed owner beamed approval of this handsome _giaour_. Even the lounging pith-hatted Englishmen nodded their appreciation of this lithe Yankee who so hurriedly bounded up the steps of Shepheard's Hotel and spoke imperiously to the Maitre d' Hotel of that famous hostelry.