The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 21

"If I'd had the power of witchcraft, I'd have put the spell on you, Jack," she declared. "I had to make you love me. I just _had_ to do it."

"I rather think you had--that power, dear."

He laughed contentedly as a man may who s.h.i.+fts all responsibility for an indiscretion to a force stronger than his own volition.

"You see," she went on as if seeking to make illogic seem logical.

"From the first--I couldn't think of you except with storm thoughts. I couldn't keep my heart quiet, when I was with you."

"At first," he reminded her, "you wanted to kill me. I heard you confiding to Rover."

Her eyes grew seriously deep and undefensive in their frankness. It was the candor of a woman's pride in conquest.

"I'm not sure yet," she said almost fiercely, "that I wouldn't almost rather kill you than--lose you to any other girl."

Vaguely and as yet remotely, Spurrier's consciousness was p.r.i.c.ked with a forecast of reality's veto, but the present spoke in pa.s.sion and the future whispered weakly in plat.i.tudes.

"You won't lose me," he protested. "I'm yours."

"And yet," went on Glory, "you seemed a long way off. You were the man who did big things in the world outside. You were--always cool and--calculating."

"Glory," his words came with the rush of impetuosity for already the whispers of warning were gaining in volume, and impulse was struggling for its new freedom, "the man you've seen to-day is one I haven't known myself before. Chilled calculation and self-repression have been the articles of my creed. I've been crusted with those obsessions like a s.h.i.+p's hull with barnacles. Did you know that when vessels pa.s.s through the Panama Ca.n.a.l, the barnacles drop off?"

She shook her head.

"No," she said, and her lips twisted into something like wistfulness as she dropped unconsciously into vernacular. "There's a lavish of things I don't know. You've got to learn 'em all to me--I mean teach them to me."

"Well," he went on slowly, "steamers that pa.s.s through the fresh water, from salt to salt, automatically cleanse their plates. You've been fresh water to me, Glory."

"Jack," she declared with tempestuous anxiety, "you say I've changed you. I'll try to change myself, too, all the ways I can--all the ways you want."

"I don't want you changed," he objected. "If you were changed, it wouldn't be you."

"Maybe," she persisted, "you'd like me better if I were taller or had black eyes."

"I wonder now," he teased with the whimsey of the moment, "what you would look like with black eyes? I can't imagine it. Will you do that for me?"

"Come to our house to-night," she irrelevantly commanded. "Won't you?"

"Yes," he said, "I'd come to-night if I had to swim the h.e.l.lespont."

But when he had left her an hour later at the crossroads and started back, his eyes fell on the ugly shapes of the three rattlesnakes, over which he had forgotten to keep watch and which she had not even seen, and yesterday came back with the impact of undisguised realization.

Yesterday and to-morrow stood out again in their own solid proportions and to-day stood like a slender wisp of heart's desire shouldered between uncompromising giants of fact.

Spurrier could no longer deny that his personal world centered about Glory; that away from her would be only the unspeakable bleakness of lonely heart hunger.

But it was equally certain that he could not abandon everything upon which he had underpinned his future, and in that structure was no niche which she could occupy.

Sitting alone in his house with a chill ache at his heart and facing a dilemma that seemed without solution, he knew for once the tortures of terror. For once he could not face the future intrepidly.

He had recognized when the army had stigmatized him and cast him out, that only by iron force and aggression could he break his way through to success. He was enlisted in a warfare captained by financiers of major caliber and committed to a struggle out of which victory would bring him not only wealth, but a place of his own among such financiers--a place which Glory could not share.

He and his princ.i.p.als alike were fighting for the prizes of the looting victor in a battle without chivalry, and whether he won or was crushed by American Oil and Gas, the native landholder must be ground and bruised between the impact of clas.h.i.+ng forces. In the trail of his victory, no less than theirs, would be human wreckage.

Sitting before his dead hearth while the afternoon shadows slanted and lengthened, Spurrier wondered what agonies had wracked the heart of Napoleon when he was called upon to choose between Josephine and a dynasty. For even in his travail the egoist thought of himself and his ambitions in Napoleonic terms.

As he sat there alone with silences about his lonely cabin that seemed speaking in still voices of vastness, the poignant personality of his thoughts brought him, by the strange anomaly of life, to realizations that were not merely personal.

Glory had won his heart and it was as though in doing so she had also made his feelings quicken for her people: these people from whose poverty, hospitality and kindness had been poured out to him: these people who had taken him at first with reserve and then accepted him with faith.

He had eaten their bread and salt. He had drunk their illicit whiskey, given to him with no fear that he would betray them even in the lawlessness which to them seemed honorable and fair.

And yet his purpose here, was the single one of enabling a certain group of money-grabbing financiers to triumph over another group at the cost of the mountaineer land-holders. It was not because, if he succeeded, there would not be enough of legitimate profit to enrich all, but because in a campaign of secrecy he could make a confidant of no one. If the enterprise were carried through at all he must have secured, for princ.i.p.als who would abate nothing and give back nothing, the necessary property bought on the basis of barren farming land.

Were it his own endeavor he could first plunder and develop and then make rest.i.tution, but acting as an agent he could no more do that than the soldier who has unconditionally surrendered, can subsequently demand terms.

The man who had been a plunger at gaming table and race track, who had succeeded as an imitator of schemes that attracted major capital, was of necessity one of imagination. Perhaps had life dealt him different cards, Spurrier would have been a novelist or even a poet, for that imagination which he had put into heavy harness was also capable of flights into phantasy and endowed with something almost mystic.

Now under the stress of this conflict in his mind, as he sat before his hearth in shadows that were vague of light and shape, that unaccustomed surrender to imagination possessed him, peopling the dimness with shapes that seemed actual.

His eye fell upon the empty three-legged stool that stood on the opposite side of the hearth, and as though he were looking at one of those motion picture effects which show, in double negative one character confronting his dual and separate self, he seemed to see a figure sitting there and regarding him out of contemptuous eyes.

It was the figure of a very young man clad in the tunic of a graduating West Point cadet and it was a figure that bore itself with the prideful erectness of one who regards his right to wear his uniform as a privilege of knighthood. For Spurrier was fancying himself confronted by the man he had been in those days of eager forward-looking, and of almost religious resolve to make of himself a soldier in the best meaning of the word. Then as his eyes closed for a moment under the vividness of the fancy, the figure dissolved into its surroundings of shadow and near the stool with folded arms and a bitterer scorn stood a lieutenant in khaki.

"So this is what you have come to be," said the imaginary Spurrier blightingly to the actual Spurrier. "A looter and brigand no better than the false _amigos_ that I fought over there. I was a gentleman and you are a cad!"

Had the man been dreaming in sleep instead of wakefulness, his vision could hardly have worn habiliments of greater actuality, and he found himself retorting in hot defensiveness.

"Whatever I am you made me. It was you who was disgraced. It is because I was once you that I am now I. You left me no choice but to fight with the weapons that came to hand, and those weapons were predatory.... If I have deliberately hardened myself it is only as soldiers of other days put on coats of mail--because soft flesh could not survive the mace and broadsword."

"And when you win your prizes, if you ever win them," the accusing vision appeared to retort, "you will have paid for them by spending all that was honorable in yourself; all that was generous and soldierly. When you were I, you led a charge across rice paddies without cover and under a withering fire. For that you were mentioned in dispatches and you had a paragraph in the Army and Navy Journal.

Have you ever won a prize since then, that meant as much to you?"

John Spurrier came to his feet, with a groan in his throat. His temples were moist and marked with a tracery of outstanding veins and his hands were clenched.

"Good G.o.d!" he exclaimed aloud. "Give me back the name and the uniform I had then, and see how gladly I'll tell these new masters to go to h.e.l.l!"

Startled at the sound of his own voice arguing with a fantasy as with a fact, the man sank back again into his chair and covered his face with his spread hands. But shutting out sight did not serve to shut out the images of his fancy.

He saw himself hired out to "practical" overlords and sent to prey on friends, then he rose and stood confronting the empty stool where the dream-accuser in uniform had stood and once more he spoke aloud. As he did so it seemed that the figure returned and stood waiting, stern and noncommittal, while he addressed it.

"Give me the success I need, and the independence it carries, and I'll spend my life exonerating my name. I'll go back to the islands and live among the natives till I find a man who will tell the truth. I'll move heaven and earth--but that takes money. I've always stood, in this business, with wealth just beyond my grasp--always promised, never realized. Let me realize it and be equipped to fight for vindication. These men I serve have the prizes to dispense, but I am bound hand and foot to them. They take their pay in advance. Once victorious I can break with them."

"And these people who have befriended you," questioned the mentor voice, "what of them?"

"I love them. They are her people. I shall seem to plunder them, but if my plans succeed I shall be in a position to make terms--and my terms shall be theirs. Until I succeed I must seem false to them. G.o.d knows I'm paying for that too. I love Glory!"

Suddenly Spurrier wiped a hand across a clammy forehead and stood looking about his room, empty save for himself. He seemed a man who had been through a delirium. But he reached no conclusion, and when twilight found him tramping toward the Cappeze house it was with a heart that beat with antic.i.p.ation--while it sought refuge in postponed decision.

When Glory received him in the lamp-lighted room he halted in amazement, for the girl who stood there with a mischievous smile on her lips no longer looked at him out of eyes violet-blue, but black as liquid jet.