The Redemption of David Corson Part 34

The boy's bliss had reached its utmost limit, and yet had not surpa.s.sed the woman's. The vigorous walk through the woods; the silent ministrations of nature; the simple food; the sweet imaginative a.s.sociations with David; but above all that most recreative force in nature,--the presence and prattle of a child,--filled her sad heart with a happiness of which she had believed herself forever incapable.

They sat for a few moments in silence, after Pepeeta had finished one of her most charming reminiscences, and then Steven, springing to his feet, exclaimed:

"Why, Pepeeta, we have forgotten the secret! Come and I will show it to thee."

She took his proffered hand and was led into the depths of the cavern.

"Thee must shut thy eyes," he said.

"Oh! but I am so frightened," she answered, pretending to shudder and draw back.

"Thee need not be afraid. I will protect thee," he said, rea.s.suringly.

She obeyed him, and they moved forward.

"Are thy eyes shut tight? How many fingers do I hold up?" he asked, raising his hand.

"Six," she answered.

"All right; there were only two," he said, convinced and satisfied.

He led her along a dozen steps or so, and then halted.

"Turn this way," swinging her about; "do not open thy eyes till I tell thee. There--now!"

For an instant the darkness seemed impenetrable; but there was enough of a faint light, rather like pale belated moonbeams than the brightness of the sun, to enable her to read her own name carved upon the smooth wall of rock.

"Ah! little deceiver, when did you do this?" she asked, touched by his gallantry.

"Do this! Why, Pepeeta, I did not do it," he answered, surprised and taken back by her misunderstanding.

"You did not do it?" she asked, astonished in her turn. "Who did it if you did not?"

"Why--can't thee guess?" he asked.

And then it slowly dawned upon her that it was the work of her lover, done in those days when he wandered about the country restless and tormented by his pa.s.sion. His own dear hand had traced those letters on the rock!

She kissed them, and burst into tears.

This was an indescribable shock to the child, who had antic.i.p.ated a result so different, and he sprang to her side, embraced her in his young arms and cried:

"What is the matter, Pepeeta? I did not mean to make thee sad; I meant to make thee happy! Oh, do not cry!"

"You have made me a thousand times glad, my dear boy," she said, kissing him gratefully. "You could not in any other way in the world give me such happiness as this. But did you not know that we can cry because we are glad as well as because we are sad?"

"I have never heard of that," he answered wonderingly.

She did not reply, for her attention reverted to the letters on the wall and she stood feeding her hungry eyes upon that indubitable proof of the devotion of her lover.

The child's instinct taught him the sacredness of the privacy of grief and love. He freed himself from her embrace, slipped out of the cave and left her alone. She laid her cheek against the rude letters, patted them with her hand, and kissed them again and again. It was bliss to know that she had inspired this pa.s.sion, although it was agony to know that it was only a memory.

The remembrance of feasts once eaten is not only no solace to physical hunger, but adds unmitigated torment to it. It is different with the hunger of the heart, which finds a melancholy alleviation in feeding upon those shadows which reality has left. The food is bitter-sweet and the alleviation is not satisfaction, but neither is it starvation!

Probably a real interview with a living, present lover, would not have given to Pepeeta that intense, though poignant, happiness which transfigured her face when she came forth into the daylight world, and which subdued and softened the noisy welcome of the boy.

CHAPTER XXVI.

OUT OF THE SHADOW

"Until the day break and the shadows flee away."

--Song of Solomon.

In due time the vessel upon which David had embarked arrived at her destination, the city of New York, and the lonely traveler stepped forth unnoticed and unknown into the metropolis of the New World.

With, an instinct common to all adventurers, he made his way to the Bowery, that thoroughfare whose name and character dispute the fame of the Corso, the Strand and the Rue de Rivoli.

Amid its perpetual excitements and boundless opportunities for adventure, David resumed the habits formed during that period of life upon which the doors had now closed. His reputation had followed him, and the new scenes, the physical restoration during the long voyage, the necessity of maintaining his fame, all conspired to help him take a place in the front rank of the devotees of the gambling rooms.

He did his best to enter into this new life with enthusiasm, but it had no power to banish or even to allay his grief. He therefore spent most of his time in wandering about among the wonders of the swiftly-growing city, observing her busy streets, her crowded wharfs, her libraries, museums and parks. This moving panorama temporarily diverted his thoughts from that channel into which they ever returned, and which they were constantly wearing deeper and deeper, and so helped him to accomplish the one aim of his wretched life, which was to become even for a single moment unconscious of himself and of his misery.

He had long ceased to ponder the problems of existence, for his philosophy of life had reached its goal at the point where he was too tired and broken-hearted to think. He could hardly be said to "live" any longer, and his existence was scarcely more than a vegetation. Like a somnambulist, he received upon the pupils of his eye impressions which did not awaken a response in his reason.

If any general conceptions at all were being formed he was unconscious of them. What he really thought of the phenomena of life upon which he thus blindly stared, he could not have definitely told; but in some vague way he felt as he gazed at the mult.i.tudes of human beings swarming through the streets, that all were, like himself, the victims of some insane folly which had precipitated them into some peculiar form of misery or crime.

And so, as he peered into their faces, he would catch himself wondering what wrong this man had done, what sin that woman had committed, and what sorrow each was suffering. That all must be in some secret way guilty and miserable, he could not doubt, for it seemed to him impossible that in this world of darkness and disorder, any one should have been able to escape being deceived and victimized. "No man," he thought, "can pick his way over all these hot plowshares without stepping on some of them. None can run this horrible gauntlet without being somewhere struck and wounded. What has befallen me, has in some form or other befallen them all. They are trying, just as I am, to conceal their sorrows and their crimes from each other. There is nothing else to do. There is no such thing as happiness. There is nothing but deception. Some of the keener ones see through my mask as I see through theirs. And yet some of them smile and look as gay as if they were really happy. Perhaps I can throw off this weight that is crus.h.i.+ng me, as they have thrown off theirs--if I try a little harder." Such were the reflections which revolved ceaselessly within his brain.

But his efforts were in vain. In this life he had but a single consolation, and that was in a friends.h.i.+p which from its nature did not and could not become an intimacy.

Among the many acquaintances he had made in that realm of life to which his vices and his crimes had consigned him, a single person had awakened in his bosom emotions of interest and regard. There was in that circle of silent, terrible, remorseless parasites of society, a young man whose cla.s.sical face, exquisite manners and varied accomplishments set him apart from all the others. He moved among them like a ghost,--mysterious, uncommunicative and unapproachable.

He had inspired in his companions a sort of unacknowledged respect, from the superiority of his professional code of ethics, for he never preyed upon the innocent, the weak, or the helpless, and gambled only with the rich or the crafty. He victimized the victimizers, and signalized his triumph with a mocking smile in which there was no trace of bitterness, but only a gentle and humorous irony.

From the time of their first meeting he had treated David in an exceptional manner. In un.o.bserved ways he had done him little kindnesses, and proffered many delicate advances of friends.h.i.+p, and not many months pa.s.sed before the two lonely, suspicious and ostracized men united their fortunes in a sort of informal partners.h.i.+p and were living in common apartments.

The most marked characteristic of this restricted friends.h.i.+p was a disposition to respect the privacy of each other's lives and thoughts.

In all their intercourse through the year in which they had been thus a.s.sociated they had never obtruded their personal affairs upon each other, nor pried into each other's secrets.

There was in Foster Mantel a sort of sardonic humor into which he was always withdrawing himself. In one of their infrequent conversations the two companions had grown unusually confidential and found themselves drifting a little too near that most dangerous of all shoals in the lives of such men--the past.

With a swift, instinctive movement both of them turned away. Each read in the other's face consciousness of the impossibility of discussing those experiences through which they had come to be what they were. Such men guard the real history of their lives and the real emotions of their hearts as jealously as the combinations of their cards. The old, ironical smile lighted up Mantel's features, and he said:

"We seem to have a violent antipathy to thin ice, Davy, and skate away from it as soon as it begins to crack a little beneath our feet."

"Yes," said his friend, shrugging his shoulders, "it is not pleasant to fall through the crust of friends.h.i.+p. There is a sub-element in every life a too sudden plunge into which might result in a fatal chill. We had all better keep on the surface. I am frank enough to say that the less any one knows about my past, the better I shall be satisfied."