WHERE THE PATH BREAKS
WHERE THE PATH BREAKS
By CAPTAIN CHARLES de CRÉSPIGNY
“Only the dark, where the path breaks off
and the milestones end.”
S. B. GUNDY : : : : : TORONTO
PUBLISHER IN CANADA FOR HUMPHREY MILFORD
Copyright, 1916, by
The Century Co.
Published, March, 1916
TO THE
WONDERFUL EYES
NEVER FORGOTTEN
PART I
THE AWAKENING
CHAPTER I
In dim twilight a spark of life glittered, glinted like a bit of mica catching the sun, on a vast face of gray cliff above a dead gray sea. There was nothing else in the world but the vastness and the grayness of the cliff and the sea, till the spark felt the faint thrill of warmth which gave to it the knowledge of its own life. “I am alive,” the whisper stirred, far down in the depths of consciousness. Next the question came, “What am I?”
At first just that infinitesimal bright glint lived where all the rest was dead, or creation not yet begun. Then slowly the answer followed the question: “I am I. A man. I was a man. I am dead. This is the twilight between worlds. I must dream back. I must know myself as I was. Later I shall wake and know what I am.”
The soul was very still, tired after an all-but-forgotten struggle. It was beginning to remember that it had suffered infinitely. It was patient, with all the patience of eternity before it. There was no hurry. Hurry and turmoil seemed strange and remote, part of some outworn experience. Lying still, it passively waited for the dream to begin. For a moment—or perhaps years—there remained only the gray blankness of the empty world; but the spark of life grew in brightness as a star grows to visibility in the pallor of an evening sky. Then, suddenly, a face flashed into existence—a girl’s face.
“I knew her. I loved her,” the soul remembered with a thrill, like a shooting ray of the star that was itself. “Where? Who was she? What were we to each other?”
The dream began to take on definiteness. The soul groped back to find its body and its lost place in the world. Not this gray limbo, but the sad and happy, the glorious and terrible world whence it had somehow passed.
The girl’s face faded away for an instant, and the face of a man seemed to be reflected in a blurred mirror. The eyes of the soul looked into the man’s eyes and knew them. They were his own. He was that man, or had been. “What a dull dog you are,” he heard himself say, as if he had said it long ago, said it often, and the echo had followed him to this twilit place beyond death. He thought the face was rather like a dog’s, an ugly mongrel dog’s. The girl could not possibly care for him! Yet some one had told him that she did care, and that she would marry him if he asked. “I’m her mother. I ought to know!” As he heard the woman’s voice speaking the words, he saw the face that belonged to the voice: the face of a pretty woman, young looking till the girl came near.... The girl had come now! The cream-and-rose tints of her youth made the other face old. This was rather pathetic. He remembered that it had so impressed him more than once. Yet he had never been able to like the mother.
The dream was growing in distinctness. They three—he and the girl and the woman—were in a house. It was a beautiful old house, in the country. Outside it was black and white, with elaborate patterns of oak on plaster. A sheet of water lay so near that the black and white front was reflected in it, like a dream within a dream. The calm water was asleep, and dreaming the house; and some great dark trees and clumps of rhododendrons were dreaming also, which seemed very confusing, and made him doubt whether there were any such soul as his, or whether after all he were only the spirit of the water or the trees, and had never known this girl who was walking with the ugly man. Yet it seemed to be the ugly man’s house, and he knew what the man was thinking. They were one and the same, at all events in the dream. And though he was out of doors with the girl, he could see every room in the house as plainly as he could see the lake and the trees and the pink rhododendrons. He seemed to pass through each room, one after another, because the girl was extolling the charm of the house, and his mind moved here and there following her words, picturing her, white and flower-like against a dark oak paneling, or old brocade, or hanging of faded tapestry.
Yes, it was a beautiful house. He had that to offer her, and money too. There were women who would take him because of what he had to give. And there was something else. What was it? Oh, a title. Not much of a title. He couldn’t believe she would be influenced by a trifle like that. She was too perfect, too wonderful. A great many men with nobler titles and more money must have asked her to marry them, or they would ask her in future; for she was still very young. So far she had never fallen in love. She had told him so.
“Not seriously in love,” she had said, half laughing, and half in earnest. “There was only my cousin. I adored him when I was child. But I haven’t seen him since I was sixteen. And now I’m twenty-one. He was most awfully good looking, and I thought he was a knight and a hero. Perhaps if he came back from India I should be disappointed in him.”
Queer that the groping soul should hold an echo of these chance words about India, though there was none for the name of the cousin, nor even of the girl herself. This made the awakening man wonder again if the girl had existed, or whether she lived only in his dreams. It was a vaguely sweet, vaguely sad dream, which seemed to have ended before it was fairly begun, with a very sorrowful ending which he couldn’t quite recall yet. He wished to go on dreaming, and to change the end if he could.
The girl and her mother were visiting the ugly man at the old black and white house. He—whoever he was—had to go away. He was begging the girl to stop until he came back. “If I do come back,” he added. “Your mother is willing to stay if you are. It would make me happy to think of you in my house, and if anything happens to me....”
“Oh, don’t speak of such things!” she broke in. “It’s terrible that you must go.”
This was very kind of her, because it was not reasonable that she could really care much—such a girl—for such a man, who had never been able to interest her, he felt. But she looked at him, looked up mistily with her dear eyes of smoke-blue. There was some message in them, behind a glaze of tears.
Drowned in those eyes, he heard himself stammering out things he had not thought that he would ever dare to say. “If you could marry me ... I don’t suppose you could ... but if....”
Her answer did not come into the dream. Perhaps she had not answered. But he could see the ugly man holding out his hands, and the girl putting her hands into them. He could see her looking up at him again, and in the beautiful eyes there was that message she wanted him to read. There, at that place, was the end of the dream-picture; it never went further, though he tried over and over to carry it on; the girl looking up, a tall slender shape in white, with the afternoon sun burnishing her hair, and giving to it the color of a copper beech tree under which she stood. He knew that he had thought, “I shall never forget her as she is now, not even when I’m dead.” He had kept his word. He was dead; hovering on the borderland of the unknown: and he had not forgotten. But just where the dream ended, before he could read the girl’s look and hear what she had to say, her mother had come quickly out of the house, with an open book in her hand. That seemed to be the reason why the picture broke.
It seemed afterwards too, though there was no clear vision, that the girl was willing to marry him, just barely willing. Her mother took it for granted that she had said “yes” when he asked her, and the girl let it go as if it were true; though he could not be sure it was what she had meant when she looked up with the strange light in her eyes, and tried to speak. He would have given years of the future he hoped for then, to have been sure, without any doubts.
When he stammered out his questions he had not thought of anything better than an engagement, to end in marriage if he came home safely after the war.... The war!... Dim remembrance of hideous suffering suddenly stirred the slow current of his dream. There had been war. That was how it had happened! He had been killed in battle. Or else, none of the dream was true! There had been no such man, no such girl, no such black and white house reflected in a crystal lake. This was a dream of things that had never been. A veil of unreality began to fall between him and the picture he had seen. No, it couldn’t have been true of his life, of course, because the dream had begun again, and was carrying him on to a wedding. The church in the village ... (he knew that church well, and the way to it from the big gates and the little gates; the long way and the short cut) ... The girl, and a man in khaki were standing together ... the same ugly man, uglier than ever in his soldier clothes, he thought. He heard the words which a clergyman in a white surplice was reading out of the prayer book. “To have and to hold, till death do you part.” And he saw himself putting a ring on the girl’s finger. She held her left hand out to him—the long, slim hand he used to think must be like St. Cecilia’s, because of the genius of music in its finger tips. He could see no following picture of her alone with him. He saw himself going away, waving good-by: then a train and a boat, and a train again, with a crowd of other men, all soldiers.
He was an officer. (He had left the army before that dream-time, he could not remember why, but it had something to do with money—and with the black and white house: and he had offered himself again for the war.) In the dream he rode a horse along a straight sunlit road, with poplars on either side that gave no shade. There were days of marching in furnace heat. Then came a night of silver moonlight reddened by fire; a village burning. There was a noise as of hell let loose: and since he had been dead he hated noise. It was the one unbearable thing. Hearing noise in his dream, the star which was his soul shattered itself into a thousand sparks, each spark a red-hot nerve of pain. All round him in the crowded dream there was fighting. Smoke stung his eyelids. He breathed it in, and choked. His horse trampled men down. Their cries were in his ears. Some voice he knew called to him for help. He pulled a man up on his horse; a friend, he thought it was, some one he cared for. Now the horse stopped, reared, and fell. By and by the man whose soul dreamed, struggled to his feet, dazed, but remembering his friend dragged him from under the hurt animal. Helmets glittered in the moonlight. Eyes glinted red in the copper glare. He fought with a sword and kept off men that pressed on him and his friend, trying to kill them both. A stab of pain shot through his hand. A bugle sounded. Men were running away. He thought they were men of the enemy; a stream of helmets going. He heard his own voice shout an order, but before it could be obeyed a din as of mountains rent asunder roared his voice down. His whole being was swallowed up as a raindrop is swallowed in a cataract. A huge round shape rushed towards him, black against moonlight and flame. Then the world burst and tore him in a million fragments....
His soul coming back to knowledge of its continuance held the impression that this rending anguish of death had been long, long ago, thousands of years ago in time: and that he was now or soon would be waking into eternity. The breaking of the dream and the pain he had suffered ought not to seem important. It ought not to matter to a disembodied spirit. Yet it did matter terribly. Most of all did it matter that the girl with the smoke-blue eyes and copper-beech hair had been swept away from him forever. She was somewhere in the world he had left behind. He did not even know her name, or whether indeed she had really been in his life. Henceforth he would have to wander through space and eternity without finding her again.
The man groaned.
“He’s coming round at last!” a woman’s voice said.
The voice sounded muffled, and far off. It sounded harsh, too. It was not a sweet voice, and it was not speaking his language. Through the gray dimness which hung over him like a cloud, trickled this impression. He wondered why, if the language were not his, he should understand what the voice said.
“G-erman,” he struggled to say, and succeeded with pain in whispering the word.
Somebody laughed. “He knows he’s in German hands!” chuckled the same voice.
An agony of regret fell upon him like an ice avalanche. He was alive, then, whoever he was, and there had never been a girl with smoke-blue eyes and copper-beech hair! She was only a dream. That must be so, because the words she had said to him were all gone from his mind. He could no longer remember anything about her except her face—and those eyes. Those eyes! His interest in past and present abruptly ceased. He let himself slide away into blank oblivion.
Hours or years later he waked up with a start, and stared at the light. It was daylight, and he was in an immense room. It seemed big enough for a theater. Perhaps it was a theater. The walls had red panels painted on them, and on each panel one or two cupids danced and threw flowers: repulsive, stout cupids. The ceiling was very far up above his eyes, and there was a dome in the center. From this dome depended a huge crystal chandelier like a bulbous stalactite. There were a great many high windows, with panes here and there opened for ventilation. The windows had no curtains, and the room had no furniture except beds—beds—endless rows of beds, surely hundreds of beds.
He lay in one of these. All were occupied. He could see heads of men whose bodies looked extraordinarily flat. On some of the heads were bandages. Others were shaved, so that they appeared quite bald. They were very pale heads in the bleak, grayish light filtering dimly through the high windows. A number of bunks were hidden by screens. He wished dully that he had this privacy, but his narrow bed had been given no such protection.
A man was slowly walking down an aisle between rows of narrow cots all exactly alike. Beside the man, who had a remarkably large head with a shock of rough, straw-colored hair, was a woman dressed as a nurse. The newly awakened one knew she was a nurse, though she was not dressed in the costume familiar to him in some vague past. There were many in the room wearing the same sort of cap and apron and prim gown that she wore: young women, middle-aged women, old women. They had kind faces, but the watcher saw no beautiful ones. Not that he cared for that, or anything.
He had not been awake long when a big girl came towards him, paused, peered, and went away again. She stopped the nurse who walked with the shock-headed man, and spoke to her. The woman’s cap and the man’s tousled hair turned from the direction they had been taking, and approached his bed. They bent over it, and he gazed up stupidly at their faces. The shock-headed man had a beard even lighter than his hair. He smoothed it with a white, strong-looking hand, a capable hand, the hand of the born surgeon. The woman had hard features, but soft eyes, wistful, and pathetic.
“You see, he is getting along finely,” she said to her companion. “I think we shall have no more trouble with him now.”
The man in bed remembered that he had heard her voice before, and that she had spoken German then, as now. He did not wonder this time why he understood what she said, though the language was not his own. He remembered that he had learned German when he was a boy, and had hated learning it because of the verbs.
“How do you feel?” the surgeon enquired, in English.
The man in bed tried to answer. His voice came in a weak whisper. This surprised him, and made him ashamed. “Very—well,” he heard himself say, as he had seemed to hear himself speak in the dream which was gone now, far away, out of reach.
“Good!” said the surgeon. “Can you tell me your name?”
The sick man thought for a moment, and the question went echoing through his brain as a voice calling one who is absent echoes through a deserted house. Knowledge of his helplessness brought a sense of physical disintegration, as if the marrow of his bones was melting.
“Never mind!” the shock-headed surgeon said, in a quiet, reassuring tone. “It’s all right. You’ll remember by and by, when you’re stronger. Don’t worry about yourself. I’ve performed an operation on you, which is known as trepanning. That was some days ago. It has been a success. But we will let you rest a while longer before we bother you with questions. The only thing is, the sooner we learn your name the sooner we can take steps to let your people hear that you’re alive. It’s a long time since you were wounded: eight months. We couldn’t operate on your head till now. There were too many other things to mend about you! Somebody must be anxious. Go to sleep again when you’ve had your food, and perhaps the past will all come back to your mind. But if it doesn’t, don’t make an effort. That will do you harm.”
The sick man expressed his thanks with the faint ghost of a smile. When the nurse had fed him with warm liquid, which he drank through a tube without lifting his bandaged head from the pillow, he closed his eyes and tried to find his way into the dream again. But the door of the dream was shut. He could see only the face of the girl. She alone remained to him, as if she had lingered and found herself locked out when the dream-door shut. She had no name, and he had none. But that seemed to be of little importance. It was easy to obey the surgeon and not make an effort. The difficult thing would have been to struggle toward any end. He felt that to do so would shatter his brain. And as he was very sure nobody cared what had become of him, there was no need. Why he was so sure of this, he could not tell. But something inside him, which remembered things he had forgotten, was absolutely sure.
How long his lethargy of mind and body lasted, he did not know. Days faded grayly into nights, and nights brightened grayly into days. Neither the surgeon nor the two nurses who had charge of him asked further questions. He took no real interest in anything except the effort to find his way back into the lost dream, which he could never do; and sometimes even the beloved face was blotted out. But at last, the objective began to dominate the subjective in the man. He gave a little thought to his surroundings. He noticed his neighbors who occupied the beds near him, and listened dully when they talked to the nurses. They were all Germans. One day he asked the nurse with the patient eyes, if there were any other Englishmen besides himself in her charge. And as he spoke the word, with confidence which he could not analyze, it sent a faint thrill through his veins, a sense of unity with something. “Englishmen!” He was an Englishman.
He had to speak in German, for the nurse had no other language. Oddly enough, it seemed easy to make her understand.
“We had four Englishmen with you when you came,” she replied. “They are—gone now.”
He understood that they were dead, and that she did not like to tell him so. He smiled faintly, but asked no more questions then.
Next, he wanted to know where the hospital was, and how long he had been in it.
“You are in Brussels,” the nurse told him. “This used to be a restaurant. All the hospitals were full. You have been here only a few weeks, but we had heard of you, for yours was a wonderful case. Many doctors have talked about it. Just before your operation, you came to us. You were brought to Herr Doctor Schwarz for that. He is a great man for the brain. You were lucky to have him to operate. It was thought you might be an officer, because you spoke both German and French, when you didn’t know what you were saying. A bit of bone pressed on the brain. Your head had been hurt. And you had many other wounds, which another great surgeon had cured, when every one else said you would surely die. That was why they waited so long before operating on your brain. You had suffered so much already. You had to grow strong after what you had gone through, and get over the nerve-shock, which was worst of all.”
“Let me see, how long did Dr. Schwarz tell me it was, before they operated?” he asked.
“Eight months,” the nurse answered reluctantly, as if she feared to excite him, yet saw no real reason why, now that he was getting well, he might not hear all the truth about himself. Besides, it might help him to remember the past. She knew that Dr. Schwarz was anxious for him to do so now. He had always been an extremely interesting and rather mysterious “case,” sent from a distance by a brother surgeon to Schwarz, and specially recommended to his attention. “Eight months,” the woman repeated. “I think you were wounded in some battle early in August. We have the record that came from the first hospital where you were. Now it is the 15th of April.”
“Eight months,” the man counted dreamily with his fingers. “Why don’t they know whether or not I was an officer?”
“It was like this,” the nurse explained, with her stolid yet kindly and truthful look; “it was like this: Your cavalry and our cavalry fought. That is the account we have, though it is not very clear. You were getting the better of us, but our artillery came up and our Uhlans were ordered to retreat. When they were safely out of the way, your lancers were shelled. I think they were cut to pieces. Nobody on either side could get at the dead and wounded for days. When they did go to help the living, it was our Germans who went. Most of the English were killed. You and the others who lived (unless a few escaped), were brought to a hospital of ours, in the north of France. Our soldiers would not do such a thing, so it must have been prowling people—thieves—who stripped off your clothes. One reason why our doctors thought you might be an officer, even before you spoke, was because the little finger of your left hand had been partly cut off. It had been done with a knife. That seemed as if you must have worn a valuable ring, so tight it couldn’t be got off in a hurry.”
“My mother’s ring,” muttered the man. The words spoke themselves. Again, it was not he who remembered, but something which seemed to be separate and independent, hiding inside him, though not in his brain. It knew all about him, but would not give up the secret. Impishly, it threw out a sop of knowledge now and then, just as it pleased. The nurse tried to encourage this Something to go on, but it would not be coaxed. When she repeated the conversation to Schwarz afterwards, however, he said, “That’s encouraging. Don’t press him too much. Let body and brain recover tone. Then we’ll try more suggestions. It’s the most interesting case we’ve had. What is it to me that he’s friend or enemy? Nothing. He’s a man. I shall think of a way to set up the right vibrations.”
The way he thought of was to commandeer a bundle of English papers which had been passing from hand to hand in Brussels. These papers had been smuggled into the town by a German who had escaped from a concentration camp in England. He was a doctor, and had got into Belgium through Holland. Such newspapers as he had were very old ones, but that did not matter, because the man in whom Schwarz, the surgeon, was interested had lost touch with the world since a day soon after the breaking out of war. He must have been among the first troops sent over from England to France, and rushed straight to the front.
For a few days he had been very silent, asking no questions. He seemed always to be thinking. By Schwarz’s orders he was left alone. Then, one morning, he was surprised by the news that he was well enough to sit up. When he had been propped with pillows, the nurse he liked best—the one with the hard features and soft eyes—slipped a roll of dilapidated newspapers under the listless hands that lay on the turned-over sheet.
“English,” she said, and saw that his eyes brightened.
·····
His left hand, with the tell-tale mutilated finger, began painfully to open out the heavy roll. He could not help much with the other hand, for his right arm had been so injured that it had been strapped to his side for weeks, and the muscles had withered. They would recover tone, and the arm its strength, Schwarz prophesied, but he was only just beginning again to use his right hand.
This was the first time he had read anything except the notices posted up on the hospital walls, which forbade loud talking and other offenses. To see the Illustrated London News and the Daily Mail and the Chronicle, dated on days of September, made him feel more than ever that he had died, and come back to earth on sufferance as a ghost. For him there had been no autumn nor winter. The world had ended on a hot night in August. There had been summer, and then blackness. Now it was spring.
September 10th. September 11th. September 13th.
The Illustrated London News lay on top. He laid back the cover. There was a battle scene on the first page. It looked vaguely familiar. British lancers and helmeted German Uhlans were fighting furiously together. Apparently it was night. The background was lit by flames from a burning village. It was an impressionist effect, well presented. The man felt very tired and old as he looked at the picture. Pains throbbed through his head and body and limbs, reminding him of each wound now healed. He turned over the page and several others. Near the middle of the paper he opened to one entirely given up to small photographs of officers. “Dead on the Field of Honor,” he read. Under each portrait were a few lines of fine print. He began with the left-hand side, at the top. Faces of strangers. Then two he recognized, with a leap of the heart. One had been an acquaintance, one an old friend. Their names rushed back to him, as if spoken by their own voices, even before he had time to read. Human interests surged round him as he lay, every-day interests of life as he had laid it down. “Dear old Charley Vance. Dead! And Willoughby....”
A photograph in the middle of the page seemed to tear itself from the paper and jump at his eyes. It was larger than the others grouped round it.... “Good God!” broke from his lips.
He glanced around, startled. He was afraid that he had screamed the words. But evidently he had not made any sound. No one was noticing him. Most of the men near by, all surgical cases, were resting quietly. Several nurses were talking at a distance, their broad, reliable backs turned his way.
It was his own photograph he was looking at ... the face of the ugly man he had seen in the lost dream, as in a dim mirror. Underneath was a name. He would know, now—his own name, and—the rest. All his blood seemed to pour away from his heart. A queer mist swam before his eyes. He tried to wink it away, but could not, and had to wait till it faded, leaving a slow shower of silver sparks.
“Killed in action, on the night of August 18th, Sir John Denin, 16th baronet, Captain —th Lancers, aged 32. See paragraph on following page.”
The man turned the leaf over. There was the paragraph.
“Captain Sir John Richard Stuart Denin, killed in the fatal night fighting near ––, where his regiment was caught by the enemy’s artillery fire in a wood, was a well-known figure in the world. It will be remembered that on the death of his uncle, Sir Stuart Denin, from whom the title passed to him, the unentailed estates were left by will to a distant cousin and favorite of the late baronet. Sir John was advised by his friends to contest the will, but refused to do so, saying his uncle had every right to dispose of his property as he chose. This generosity was considered quixotic, but had a romantic reward a few months later when an aunt of the new baronet’s mother bequeathed him one of the most beautiful and historic of the ancient black and white houses in Cheshire, Gorston Old Hall, and half a million pounds. On receiving this windfall of fortune which was entirely unexpected, it will be recalled that Sir John resigned from the army, he being at the time a first lieutenant in the —th Lancers. Two years later, on the outbreak of the war, he at once offered his services, which were accepted, and he was given a captaincy in his old regiment, leaving for the front with the first of our Expeditionary Force, and he was, unhappily, also among the first to fall. On the day of his departure Sir John was quietly married at his own village church in Gorston, Cheshire, to Miss Barbara Fay of California, U.S.A., who is thus left a widow without having been a wife. Everything he possessed, including Gorston Old Hall, passes by the will of the deceased officer to his widow. As Miss Fay, Lady Denin was considered one of the most beautiful American girls ever presented to their Majesties, she having made her début at an early court in the spring of 1913, or a little over a year before her wedding and widowhood. The mother of Lady Denin, though married to an American professor of Egyptology who died some years ago, has English blood in her veins; and is a near relative of Captain Trevor d’Arcy of the—th Gurkhas, now on the way to France with his gallant regiment. Captain d’Arcy’s photograph taken with his men at the time of the Durbar, appears on the following page, also that of the newly widowed Lady Denin. In the battle where Captain Sir John Denin met his death, he greatly distinguished himself by gallant conduct, and to him would have been due a signal success had not the German artillery rescued the defeated Uhlans and followed up their flight with a withering fire. Sir John succeeded in saving the life of his first lieutenant, the Honble. Eric Mantell, who was one of the few to escape this massacre, and who had the sad privilege of identifying his preserver’s mutilated body on the battlefield. Sir Eric had recovered sufficiently from his wounds to be present at the funeral, the remains of the dead hero having after some unavoidable delay been brought to England and buried in Gorston churchyard. Had Sir John lived, it is said that he would have been recommended for the Victoria Cross.”
The man who had died and been buried, whose body had been identified by his friend and taken home, fell back on the thin hospital pillow, and closed his eyes. He felt as if he had come to a blank wall, stumbled against it, and fallen. Then, suddenly, he realized that by turning over a page, he could see her face—the face of his wife.
He turned the page, but for a moment it was a blank, blurred surface, as if everything on it had been blocked out by order of the censor. He found himself counting his own heart-beats, and it was only as they slowed down that the page cleared, and the eyes he had seen in the lost dream looked up at him from the paper.
They gave him back himself. A thousand details of the past rushed upon him in a galloping army.
“Lady Denin, widow of Captain Sir John Denin,” he read. “She is shown in this photograph in her presentation dress, as Miss Barbara Fay.”
Barbara had disliked the photograph. He could see it now, in a silver frame on her mother’s writing desk, in the drawing-room of the little furnished house taken for the season in London. He had been shown into that room when he made his first call. Mrs. Fay had asked him to come, just when he was wondering how to get the invitation. And Mrs. Fay had given him one of those photographs. It occurred to him that she must also have given one to the newspaper. Barbara would not have wished it to be published. But he had thought it beautiful, and he thought it more than ever beautiful now.
His wife—no, his widow! That was what the paper said: “Lady Denin, widow of Captain Sir John Denin.” What would she do, what would she say, if she could see the wreck of John Denin, in a German hospital in Belgium, staring hungrily at her picture?
He asked himself this, and answered almost without hesitation. She was so loyal, so fine, that she would not grudge him his life. She would even try, perhaps, to think she was glad that he lived. Yet she could not in her secret heart, be glad. Such gladness would not be natural to human nature. She had been hurried into marrying him, partly because he loved her and was going away to fight, partly because her mother urged it as the best solution of her difficulties. Now, all things Mrs. Fay had wanted for the girl were hers without the one drawback; the plain, dull fellow who had to be taken with them—the fly in the ointment, the pill in the jam. Barbara had dearly loved the old black and white house. She had said so a dozen times. She had never once said that she loved John Denin. She had only smiled and been kind, and looked at him in a baffling way, with that mysterious message in her eyes which he had been too stupid to read. Mrs. Fay had loved the house too, and the whole place; and it was hard to believe in looking back, that she had not loved the money, and the idea of a title for her beautiful girl.
John Denin, who ought to have died and had not died, asked himself what was now the next best thing to do. Also he asked the eyes in the photograph, but they seemed gently to evade his eyes, just as they had often evaded them in life.
Next on the page to Barbara’s picture was the portrait of her cousin, Captain d’Arcy, of whom she had spoken more than once, the “hero and knight” of her childhood. He looked a handsome enough fellow in his uniform, though hardly of the “hero and knight” type. He was too full-fleshed for that: a big, low-browed, thick-lipped man of thirty-six or seven, who would think a great deal of himself and his own pleasure. Evidently he had changed since the days when he was the ideal hero of a sixteen-year-old girl. Denin, scarred and wrecked, a bit of human driftwood, was dimly shocked at the mean pleasure had in this thought. Barbara—wife or widow—was unlikely to feel her old love rekindle at sight of her cousin, and Denin was glad—glad. Barbara was not a girl to fall in love easily. But, if she believed herself free, she might some day....
A spurt of fire darting up his spine seemed to burn the base of his brain. It struck him almost with horror that the question he had been asking a few minutes ago had answered itself. No matter how undesirable he might be as a husband, he must for Barbara’s own sake force the fact of his continued existence upon her.
“As soon as I can control my hand enough to hold a pencil, I’ll write to her—or her mother. Or perhaps I’ll try to telegraph, if that’s possible from here,” he thought. Poor Barbara! Poor Mrs. Fay! It would be a blow to them, and—yes, by Jove, to Frank Denin, his cousin. Poor Frank, too! He had got the Denin estates and the money which ought to have gone with the baronetcy, and then by an extra stroke of luck the title had fallen to him, on top of all the rest. It would be a wrench for him to give it up after more than eight months of enjoyment. Then there was that pretty American girl, Miss VanKortland, to whom poor old Frank had proposed time after time. All his money and the two big places had made no difference to her. She had plenty of money of her own. She had seemed to like Frank Denin, but she was a desperate flirt and had always said that if she ever married out of her own country, it would be a man with a title. It was Kathryn VanKortland who had introduced Sir John Denin to Barbara Fay at a dance, not long after Barbara’s presentation. John had felt grateful to Kathryn for that, and indirectly grateful to Frank because if it hadn’t been for him he would not have been invited to Miss VanKortland’s dance. How strangely, vividly, yet dreamily those days and everything that had happened in them came back to him, while the people whose faces he called up thought of him in his grave! He wondered how it was that Eric Mantell had escaped, and how Eric came to believe that he had identified John Denin’s body. He wondered also whether, now that Frank Denin was “Sir Frank,” Kathryn VanKortland had changed her mind.
“I wish I could make the title over to Frank,” the man in the hospital cot said to himself. “God knows I don’t value it for myself, and I don’t believe Barbara does. But it can’t be. And there’s just one thing to be done.”
There seemed to the weary brain of the invalid, however, no great hurry about doing the one thing. Barbara was certainly not grieving for him. There was no one else to care very much except some of the old servants, and he had remembered all of them in his will before going to the front. As for Frank, in a way it would be a good thing for him if he could secure Kathryn before the news came bereaving him of the baronetcy. The girl could not leave him if they were married, or even throw him over with decency if they were engaged. Besides, Denin wanted to write the letter himself. He would not trust the task to one of the nurses, and had confided to no one yet the fact that memory of his past had come back. He was only just beginning to use his right hand for a few minutes at a time. It would be a week at the least, before he could write even a short letter without help.
Two days went by, and the surgeon’s orders to “let him alone,” so that he might “come round of his own accord,” were still observed. Nobody questioned the invalid about himself, though the nurses said to each other that he had “begun to think.”
On the third day, a wounded British aviator was brought into his ward. The news ran about like wildfire, and Denin soon learned that a fellow countryman of his had arrived. The aviator, it seemed, had been in the act of dropping bombs on some railway bridge which meant the cutting of important communications, when he had been brought down with his monoplane, by German guns. Both his legs were broken, but otherwise he was not seriously hurt.
Denin enquired of a nurse who the man was, and heard that he was Flight Commander Walter Severne.
The sound of that name brought a faint thrill. Denin did not know Walter Severne, but he had met an elder brother of his, who was one of the first and cleverest military airmen of England. It was probable that Walter Severne might have seen John Denin somewhere, or his photograph—if only the photograph in that copy of the Illustrated London News, which had labeled him as “dead on the field of honor.” If his scars had not changed him past casual recognition, Severne would be likely to know him again, and it occurred to Denin that to be identified in such a way would not be a bad thing. Besides, if the aviator had not been away from England long, he might possibly have news to give of Barbara—and Frank—and Kathryn VanKortland.
They were more or less in the same set, in the normal days of peace which seemed so long ago. He asked permission, when he was got up for his hour out of bed, to talk to the wounded Englishman, and was told that he might do so, provided that an English-speaking nurse was near enough to hear everything they said to each other.
Denin’s progress along the ward was slow. He had not been an invalid eight months for nothing, and the mending of his splintered bones and torn muscles was hardly short of a miracle, as surgeons and nurses reminded him frequently, with glee. He moved with a crutch, and one foot could not yet be allowed to touch ground, though Schwarz gaily assured him that some fine day he might be as much of a man as ever again, thanks to his enemies’ skill and care. Severne had been told that an Englishman who had lost his memory through injuries to the head, and forgotten his own name, was coming to talk to him. Lying flat on his back with both legs in plaster-of-Paris, the aviator looked up expectantly; but no light of recognition shone in his eyes when the tall form in hospital pajamas hobbled into his range of vision.
Denin did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed. Certainly he was not surprised, for he had asked for a mirror that morning, and had studied his marred face during a long, grim moment. From temple to jaw on the left side it was scarred with a permanent red scar. A white seam where stitches had been, ran through the right eyebrow. A glancing bit of shrapnel had cleft his square chin precisely in the center, giving a queer effect as of a deep dimple which had not been there before August 18th; and his thick black hair was threaded with gray at both temples.
A chair was given to him, in which to sit by the newcomer’s bedside. Severne was very young and, it seemed to Denin in contrast with that new vision of himself, as beautiful as a girl. Warned that the other man had lost his memory, the wounded aviator was pityingly careful not to ask questions. He talked cheerfully about his own adventures, and said that he had been “at home” on leave only a week ago.
“At home!” Denin echoed. “What was it like—over there?”
“Awfully jolly,” said Severne. “Not that they don’t care, or aren’t thinking about us, every minute, night and day. But you know how our people are. They make the best of things; they have their own kind of humor—and we understand. Fact is, I—went over to get married. I suppose—er—you never knew the Lacy-Wilmots of Devonshire? They’re neighbors of ours. I married the second daughter, Evelyn. I—we had two days together.”
“You were lucky,” said Denin.
“Think so? Well, we didn’t look at it like that. I wrote to her this morning. Hope she’ll get the letter.”
“Some fellows had only an hour or two with their brides, I heard,” Denin said, almost apologetically.
“That’s true,” said Severne. “Jove! There are shoals of war brides, poor girls, and as brave as they make ’em, every one!”
“What about—the war widows?” Denin ventured, stumbling slightly over the words.
“They’re brave too, all right. But I expect there are some broken hearts. Not all, though, by any means. Damn it, no! Lady Denin, for instance. Did you ever hear of her? I mean, did you ever hear of John Denin? They had about an hour of being married before he went off with the first lot in August, poor chap.”
“What about Denin?”
“Oh, you didn’t know him, then? Why should you? I didn’t myself, but he belonged to one or two clubs with my brother Bob. I may have seen him myself. Awfully fine chap. Everybody liked him, though he was close as a clam—no talker. Came into a ripping place and piles of oof a few years ago. Not much on looks, though he was an A1 sportsman and athlete. Girls thought him a big catch. I’ve heard plenty say so. Well, he married an American girl, a beauty, the day he left for the front, and about a fortnight later she was a widow with everything he had, made over to her. That wasn’t much above eight months ago. But the day Evie and I were tied up, the first of last week, Lady Denin married her cousin, d’Arcy of the —th Gurkhas. Quick work—what? No heartbreak there!”
As there came no answer, Severne supposed that his visitor felt no interest in this bit of gossip apropos of war widows. He glanced up from his hard, flat pillow at the other man, and saw what he took for a far-away look on the scarred face. To change the subject to one more congenial, the aviator began to chat of things at the front; but almost instantly the English-speaking nurse intervened. The two invalids had talked long enough. Both must rest. They could see each other again next day.
Without any protest, and scarcely saying good-by, Denin dragged himself back to his own part of the ward. “‘Nobody home!’ The poor fellow looks as if he wasn’t all there yet.” Severne excused the seeming rudeness of the nameless one.
Denin had not had his full hour of freedom from bed, but he declared that he was tired and that his head ached, so he was allowed to lie down. He turned his face to the wall, and appeared to sleep, but never had he been more vividly awake.
His plan had fallen into ruin with one bewildering crash. The corner-stone had been torn out from the foundation. His duty—or what he had seen as his duty—was changed. After all, Barbara had not been disappointed in her cousin. She had found him her “knight and her hero” as of old. She had loved the man so passionately that she had given herself to him after only eight months of widowhood. If he had heard this thing of a woman other than Barbara, Denin would have been revolted. It could only have looked like an almost defiant admission that there was no love in the first marriage—nothing but interest. He could not, would not, however, think that Barbara’s act was a proof of hardness. Lying on his bed, with his face to the blank white wall, he began to make desperate excuses for the girl.
She had married him by special license at three days’ notice eight months ago, hurried into a decision by his love, and perhaps the glamour of war’s red light. Her mother, too, had given her no peace until she made up her mind. For the hundredth time he assured himself of that fact. And as for the well-nigh indecent haste of the second wedding; why, after all, was it so much worse than the first?
Her marriage with him, John Denin, had been a marriage only in name. She was left a girl, with no memories of wifehood. No doubt this new giving of herself had been another “war wedding.” Trevor d’Arcy in his picture looked like a man who would do his best to seize whatever he wanted. He had of course been going away, perhaps after being wounded and nursed by Barbara. It would be natural, very natural, for her to feel that she would be happier when d’Arcy was at the front, if they belonged to each other. Denin told himself savagely that it would be brutal to blame the girl. She had a right to love and joy, and she should have both, unspoiled. He would be damned sooner than snatch happiness from Barbara, and drag her through the dust of shame, a woman claimed as wife by two men.
“This decides things for me, then, forever and ever,” he thought, a strange quietness settling down upon him, like a cloud in which a man is lost on a mountain-top. “She’s free as light. John Denin died last August in France.”
But the man in the German hospital did not die. He could not, unless he put an end to his own life, and to do that had always seemed to Denin an act of cowardice and weakness. He remembered reading as a boy, how Plato said that men were “prisoners of the gods” and had no right to run away from fate. For some reason those words had made a deep imprint upon his mind at the time, and the impression remained. His soul dwelt in his body as a prisoner of the gods, a prisoner on parole.
Life—mere physical life—rose again in his veins as the days went on, rose in a strong current, as the sap rises in trees when winter changes to spring. He was discharged from the hospital as cured, and interned in a concentration camp in Germany not far from the Dutch frontier. Though he had given his parole to the gods, he would not give it to the Germans. He meant to escape some day if he could. He limped heavily, and had not got back the full strength of his once shattered right hand, so there was no hope of returning to fight under a new name. Had there been a chance of that, he would have wished to join the French Foreign Legion, where a man can be of use as a soldier, while lost to the world. As it was, he made no definite plans, but set about earning money in order not to be penniless if the day ever came when he could snatch at freedom.
He had always had a marked talent for quick character-sketches and a bold kind of portraiture. He could catch a likeness in a moment. With charcoal he dashed off caricatures of his fellow prisoners, on the whitewashed wall of the room which he shared with several British soldiers. The striking cleverness of the sketcher was noticed by the man in charge who spoke to some one higher in authority; and officers came to gaze gravely at the curious works of art. Denin had rechristened himself by this time “John Sanbourne.” Sanbourne seemed to him an appropriate name for one without an aim in life, and as for “John,” without that standby he would have felt like a man who has thrown away his clothes. Sanbourne’s charcoal sketches, therefore, began to be talked about; and officers brought him paper and colored chalks, bargaining with him for a few German war notes, to take their portraits. By the end of May he had saved up two hundred marks, accumulated in this way, charging from five to twenty marks for a sketch, according to size and detailed magnificence of uniform.
Not having given his parole, he was carefully watched at first, but as time went on his lameness, his exemplary conduct, and air of stoical resignation deceived his guards. One dark night he slipped away, contrived to pass the frontier, bribed a Dutch fisherman to sell him clothing, and after a week of starvation and hardship limped boldly into Rotterdam. There he parted with the remainder of his earnings (save a few marks) for a third-class ticket to New York, trusting to luck that he might earn money on board as he had earned money in camp, enough at least to be admitted as an emigrant into the United States. Those few marks which he kept, he invested in artist’s materials, and on shipboard soon made himself something of a celebrity in a small way. He was nicknamed “the steerage Sargent,” and with an hour or two of work every day put together nearly sixty American dollars during the voyage. That sum satisfied him. He refused further commissions, for a great new obsession dominated his whole being, preoccupying every thought. Absorbed in it, he found his portrait-making exasperating work. Something within him that he did not understand but was forced to obey, commanded the writing of a book—the book, not of his life or of his outside experiences, but of his heart.
He had no idea of publishing this book after it was written. Indeed, at the beginning, such an idea would have been abhorrent to him. It would have been much like profaning a sanctuary. But there were thoughts which seemed to be in his soul, rather than in his brain, so intimate a part of himself were they; and these thoughts beat with strong wings against the barrier of silence, like fierce wild birds against the bars of a cage.
So ignorant was John Denin of book-writing that he did not know at all how long it would take to put on paper what he felt he had to give forth. He knew only that he must say what was in him to say; and every moment when he was not writing he chafed to get back to his book again. Indeed, it was but his body which parted from the manuscript even when he ate, or walked, or slept. His real self was writing on and on, every instant, after he had gone to bed, and most of all, while he dreamed. The idea for the book, when it sprang into his mind, was full-grown as Minerva born from the brain of Jove. Denin felt as if he were a sculptor who sees his statue buried deep in a marble block, and has but to hew away the stone to set the image free. He got up each morning at dawn, bathed, dressed hurriedly, and worked till breakfast time, when a cup of tea and a piece of bread were all he wanted or felt he had time to take. Then, in some out-of-the-way, uncomfortable corner where his fellow travelers of the steerage were not likely to interrupt him, he wrote on often till evening, without stopping to eat at noon. He used ship’s stationery begged from the second class, sheets off his own drawing pads, and small blank books that happened to be for sale in the wonderful collection of things ships’ barbers always have. Sometimes he scribbled fast with one pencil after another: sometimes he scratched painfully along with a bad pen. But nothing mattered, if he could write. And nothing disturbed him; no noise of yelling laughter, no shouting game, no crying of babies, nor blowing of bugles.
“When that chap’s got his nose to his paper, he wouldn’t hear Gabriel’s trump,” one man said of him to another. Everybody asked everybody else what he was doing when he suddenly stopped his traffic of portraits; but nobody dared put such a question to him. Some people guessed that he was a journalist in disguise, who had been in the war-zone, and was working against time to get his experiences onto paper before the ship docked at New York. But, as a matter of fact, it did not occur to Denin to wonder when he should finish until, suddenly and to his own surprise, the strange story he had been writing—if it could be called a story—came to its inevitable climax. His message was finished. There was no more that he wished to say.
This was at twelve o’clock one night, and the next morning at six the ship passed the Statue of Liberty.
Denin felt dazed among his fellow emigrants, all of whom were of a different class in life from his, and all of whom seemed to have something definite to expect, something which filled them with excitement or perhaps hope, making them talk fast, and laugh as the immense buildings of New York loomed picturesquely out of the silver mist.
“Othello’s occupation’s gone,” he found himself muttering as he leaned on the rail, a lonely figure among those who had picked up friendships on the voyage. He realized that he had been almost happy while he was writing his story. Now that it was finished and had to be put aside, he had nothing to look forward to. He was indeed sans bourne.
What the other steerage passengers did on landing, he did also. Vaguely it appealed to his sense of humor (which had slept of late) that he, Sir John Denin, should have his tongue looked at and questions put to him concerning his means, character, and purpose in coming from Europe to the United States. He went through the ordeal with good nature, and passed doctors and inspectors without difficulty. When he was free, he joined a couple of elderly Belgians to whom he had talked on shipboard, and with them set forth in search of a cheap lodging-house, where he might stay until he made up his mind what work he was fit to try for, and do. He was a poor man now, and could not afford to live in idleness for more than a few days. He realized this, also that a “job” of any kind was hard to get, and doubly hard for him since he was not trained for clerical work or strong enough at the moment to undertake manual labor. Still, he could not resist the intense desire he had to shut himself up and read the book which, when he thought of it, seemed to have written itself. He had always gone on and on, never stopping to glance back or correct; and he had a queer feeling that the story would be a revelation to him, that help and comfort and strength would come to him from its pages.
The Belgians remained in the lodging-house only long enough to unpack a few things. They then went out together to see New York, and visit an agency which had been recommended to them. But Denin shut himself up as he had longed impatiently to do, in the tiny back room he had engaged, on the top floor of a dreary house. There he took from the cheap bag bought in Rotterdam—his one piece of luggage—the oddly assorted pages of manuscript which made up a thick packet. With the moment that he began to read, the stained walls and the dirty window with a fire-escape outside vanished as if some genie had rubbed a lamp.
The story was of a soldier and his love for a girl who did not greatly care for him. She married him rather than send him away empty-hearted to the front, cold with disappointment, when it was in her power to arm him with happiness. They parted on the day of the wedding. The soldier went to France and was killed in his first fight. The girl grieved because it had not been possible to love the man with her whole heart, and because he had had no time (so she believed) to taste the joy she had sacrificed herself to give. But the man, going into battle and afterwards dying on the battlefield, was divinely happy and content. He saw clearly that his love for her had been the great thing in his life, its crown and its completion; that the thought of her as his wife was worth being born for; that it made death only a night full of stars with a promise of sunrise. The story did not end with the ending of the soldier’s life. The part before his death was no more than a prelude. The real story was of the power of love upon the spirit of a man after his passing, and his wish that the adored woman left behind might know the vital influence of a few hours’ happiness in shaping a soul to face eternity. The book was supposed to be written in the first person, by the man, and was in four parts. The first told of the courtship and marrying; the second, of the man’s going away from his wife-of-an-hour, to the front, and his fall on the battlefield; the third described the regret of the girl that she had not been able to give more, and her resolve to atone by denying herself love if it came to her in future; the fourth, the dead soldier’s attempt to make her feel the truth; that she was free of obligation because those few last hours had been a gift of joy never to be taken from his soul.
Denin had dashed down a title on the first page of his manuscript before beginning the book. There had seemed to him only one name for it: “The War Wedding.” Now that he came to read it all over, he still had the feeling that something in him more powerful than himself had done the writing; and suddenly he began to wish intensely that Barbara might see the testament of his heart.
He wished this not because he was proud of his work, or thought it superlatively good, but because he hoped that it might comfort her. She had been strangely reserved with him, invariably baffling, almost mysterious, during the latter half of their acquaintance, yet he had felt that he knew the truth of her nature, deep down under the girlish concealments. He had believed her tender-hearted. If she had not been so, why had she married him? And he thought that a girl of her strong character and sensitive spirit might be stabbed with remorse sometimes after gathering the flower of happiness for herself so near a new-made grave. He could not bear to think that Barbara might torture her conscience for his sake. He wanted her to be happy, wanted it more than anything else now. Not that he was naturally a marvel of unselfishness, but that he loved Barbara Fay better than he had ever loved himself. If this story which he had written—like, yet unlike, her own story—should happen to fall into Barbara’s hands, she might find consolation through all the coming years, because of certain thoughts from the man’s point of view, thoughts that would almost surely be new to her. And what joy for Denin, even lying in the gulf of forgetfulness, if his hand could reach out from the shadows to give her a thornless white rose of peace!
He wondered eagerly if he could find a publisher in New York—a publisher who produced books in England as well as America—to accept his manuscript.
Now that the wish was born, it seemed too good to be true that anything could come of it. Still, he determined to try, and try at once. Full of excitement he went out into a noisy street, and bought several newspapers and magazines. There were a number of publishers’ advertisements in them all, some with familiar names, but one he had known ever since he was old enough to read books. It was a name of importance in the publishing world, but there was no harm in aiming high. He had brought the manuscript out with him, because he could not bear to leave it alone in a strange house. Now he decided to take the parcel to the publisher himself. Nothing would have induced him to trust it to the post.
Four-thirty in the afternoon was Eversedge Sibley’s hour for leaving his office. If he had cared about escaping earlier he could easily have got away, for since his father’s death he stood at the head of the old publishing house; but to him business was the romance, poetry, and adventure of life. He passionately loved the champ and roar of the printing-presses as many people love a Wagner opera. There were never two days alike. Something new was always happening. Yet just because he was young for his “job,” and knew that he was a man of moods and temperament, he forced himself to be bound by certain rules. One of these rules was, even if he chose to linger a few minutes after four-thirty, that no caller need hope to be admitted. That was a favorite regulation of Sibley’s. It made him feel that, after all, he was very methodical. One afternoon, however, he did a worse thing than break this rule. He went back from the elevator, the whole length of the corridor to the outer office, simply to enquire about a man he had met at the lift door.
They almost collided as the man was stepping out and as Sibley was about to step in. But he did not step in. He let the lift shoot down without him, while he paused to stare after the man.
“Strange-looking customer!” he thought.
Sibley himself was a particularly immaculate person. Being somewhat of the Latin type, black eyed and olive skinned, he was shamefacedly afraid of looking picturesque. He dressed, therefore, as precisely as a fashion-plate. The man who had got out of the lift might have bought his clothes at a junk-shop, and a foreign junk-shop at that. They were not clothes a gentleman could wear—yet Sibley received a swift impression that a gentleman was wearing them at that moment: a remarkably tall fellow, so thin that his bones looked somehow too big for him.
He walked past Sibley with no more than a glance, yet it was partly the glance which impelled Sibley to stop short and gaze at the back of a badly made tweed coat, the worst sort of a “reach-me-down” coat.
The quick mind of the publisher was addicted to similes. (He had once written a book himself, under a nom de guerre. It had failed.) The thought sprang to his mind that the glance was like the sudden opening of a dingy box, which let out a flash of secret jewels.
In spite of his shocking clothes, the man had the air and bearing of a soldier. Sibley noticed this, in criticizing the straight back, and it aroused his curiosity more than ever in connection with the scarred face.
Any one who got out at the tenth floor of the Sibley building must want to see Eversedge Sibley or one of his partners, so evidently this person intended to ask for some member of the firm. He looked the last man on earth to be a budding author; yet Eversedge Sibley had caught sight of a paper-wrapped roll of manuscript. One who was not of the publishing or editorial world might have mistaken it for something else; but no manuscript would disguise itself from eyes so trained to fear and avoid it.
“Looks more like a heavy-weight champion invalided after a desperate scrap, than a writer; or like Samson betrayed by Delilah,” thought Sibley, rather pleased with the fancy.
He put out his hand to touch the bell for the lift to come up again, but did not touch it. Instead, he turned and walked back along the marble-walled corridor to the door of the reception room. The tall man had just arrived and was talking to a wisp of a creature facetiously known in the office as “the chucker out.”
“Mr. Sibley has gone, sir,” little McNutt was insisting, with dignity. “He doesn’t generally receive strangers. Mr. Elliot is in, though, and might see you if you could wait—”
As he spoke, McNutt caught sight of his “boss” at the door, and by looking up a pair of thick gray eyebrows, he made a distressful signal of warning. It would be awkward for Mr. Sibley to be trapped and buttonholed here, just as he had been officially described as out. McNutt could not remember the boss ever coming back after he had gone for the day, and appearing in the publicity of the reception room. If he had forgotten something, why didn’t he let himself in at the door of his own private office, which was only a little further along the hall? But, there he was, and must be protected.
“Who is Mr. Elliot?” enquired the stranger.
Eversedge Sibley spent a short holiday in England every summer, and knew that the vilely dressed man had the accent of the British upper classes. His curiosity grew with what it fed on.
“Mr. Elliot is the third partner in the firm,” explained McNutt, to whom such ignorance appeared disgraceful.
“Thank you, I’d rather wait until to-morrow and try to see Mr. Sibley himself,” said Denin.
“I am Mr. Sibley,” the publisher confessed, on one of his irresistible impulses. “I’ve just come back for something forgotten. I can give you a few minutes if you like.”
The man’s face lit. It could never have been anything but plain, almost ugly, even before the scars came; yet it was singularly arresting. “That’s very good of you,” he said.
Sibley ushered the odd visitor into his own private office, but before he could even be invited to sit down, Denin got to his errand.
“You must have thousands of manuscripts sent to you,” he began, with a shyness which appealed to Sibley. “I—suppose you hardly ever read one yourself? You have men under you to do that. But I felt I shouldn’t be satisfied unless I could put the—the stuff I’ve written into your own hands. Probably all amateurs feel like that!”
“Manuscripts which our readers pronounce on favorably I always go through myself before accepting them,” Sibley assured his visitor. “But of course, there are a good many that—er—they don’t think worth bothering me with.”
“There’s no reason for me to hope that mine will deserve a better fate,” Denin said. “All the same it would—be a great thing for me if you should bring it out—publish it on both sides of the water. It isn’t as if I expected money for my work. I don’t. I shouldn’t even want money. On the contrary—”
Sibley cut him short with a warning. “We’re not the sort of publishers who print books that authors have to bribe us to put on the market. If a book’s worth our while to publish, it’s worth our while to pay for it.”
Denin laughed. “I wasn’t going to suggest any arrangement of that kind,” he apologized. “I’m too poor for such a luxury. I’ve just come to New York, third class, and I must ‘hustle’ to make my living. But I wrote this on shipboard, while I had the time—”
“You wrote a whole book on shipboard!” exclaimed Sibley.
Denin was taken aback by the publisher’s surprise. “Well, it was a slow boat—twelve days. And my mind was full of this story. I had to write it. I kept at it night and day. But for all I know there mayn’t be enough to make a book. That would be a bit of a blow! I’m as ignorant as a child of such things.”
“About how many thousand words does your manuscript amount to?” Sibley asked, glancing at the rather thin brown packet tied with a string.
“I haven’t the remotest idea!” Denin admitted. “It didn’t occur to me to count words.”
“H’m!” muttered the publisher. “You say it’s a story—a novel?”
“It’s a sort of a story,” its writer explained. “I may as well mention—you’re sure to guess if you glance over my work—that I’ve been fighting in France. I was pretty badly knocked out—some months ago. And you can see from the look of me that I can’t be of use as a soldier while the war lasts, if ever. Otherwise I shouldn’t be in New York now. One doesn’t chuck fighting in these days unless one’s unfit. While I was in hospital, I got to thinking how a man might feel in certain circumstances—(not like my own, of course; but one imagines things)—and—well, the idea rather took hold of me. Here it is. I don’t expect you to read the thing yourself. It’s not likely that—”
“I promise you so much,” said Sibley, with suppressed eagerness. “I will read it myself before handing it over to any one else.”
The scarred face flushed; and again came that sudden light as from a secret glitter of jewels. “I can’t thank you enough!” Denin almost stammered.
“Don’t thank me yet. That would be very premature!” Sibley smiled generously; but even if he had wished to do so, he couldn’t have patronized the fellow. “You mustn’t be too impatient. I’m a busy man, you know. I’ll have a go at your manuscript as soon as I can, but you mustn’t be disappointed if you don’t hear for a week or ten days. By the way, you’d better give me a card with your name and address.”
Denin laughed again, a singularly pleasant laugh, Sibley thought it. “I haven’t such a thing as a card! My name is—John Sanbourne. And if I may have a scrap of paper, I’ll write down my address. I forgot to put it on the manuscript. I mayn’t be at the same place when you’re ready to decide. But I’ll tell them to forward the letter, and then I’ll call on you. I’d rather do that than let the story go through the post. I’ve got—fond of it in a way—you see!”
Sibley did see. And the man being what he was, the fondness struck the publisher as pathetic, like the love of Picciola for his pale prison-flower. Reason told Sibley that the ten or twelve days work of an amateur (one who had lived to thirty or so, without being moved to write) would turn out mere twaddle. Yet instinct contradicted reason, as it often did with Sibley. He had a strong presentiment that he should find at least some remarkable points in the work of this scarred soldier, whose square-jawed face seemed to the secretly romantic mind of Sibley a mask of hidden passions.
Only a few times since he became head of the house had Eversedge Sibley consented to see a would-be author whose fame was all to make. The few he had received had been fascinating young women of society with influence among his friends, famous beauties, or noted charmers; but he had never taken so deep an interest in one of them as in the poverty-stricken, steerage passenger. He went as far as the reception room in showing his guest out; and then instead of going down to his motor, which would be waiting for him, let it wait. He returned to his office, and looked again at the address which the author had laid on his parcel of manuscript.
“John Sanbourne!” Eversedge Sibley said to himself, aloud. The man’s face was as sincere as it was plain, nevertheless Sibley was somehow sure that his real name was not Sanbourne. He was sure that the inner truth of the man, if it could but be known, was a contradiction of the rough and strange outside; and he wished so intensely to get at the hidden inner side that he could not resist opening the parcel there and then.
Never had Eversedge Sibley seen such a manuscript. He was used to clearly typed pages of uniform size, as easy to read as print. This was written partly with pencil, partly with pen and ink, apparently three or four different kinds of pens, each worse than the other. The paper, too, consisted of odds and ends. The whole thing suggested poverty and the meager condition of a steerage passenger. But this squalor, which in most circumstances would have caused Sibley to fling down the stuff in fastidious disgust, sent a thrill through him. No ordinary man with ordinary things to say could have had the courage to struggle through such difficulties, to any desired end. The longing to tell this story, whatever it was, must have been strong in the man’s soul as the urge of travail in the body of a woman.
In spite of the mean materials, the writing was clear, and suggested—it seemed to the mood of Sibley—something of the man’s strength and intense reserve.
“’The War Wedding,’” he read at the top of the first page. “Heavens, I hope it’s not going to be in blank verse!”
It was not in blank verse. He had to read only the first lines to assure himself of that.
The story began with the description of a garden. It was simply done, but it painted a picture, and—praise be to the powers, there were no split infinitives nor gush of adjectives! Eversedge Sibley saw the garden. He was the man who walked in it, and met the girl who came down the stone steps between the blue borders of lavender. The story became his story. For an hour he forgot his office, his waiting chauffeur, and everything else that belonged to him.
So he might have gone on forgetting, if Stephen Eversedge, his junior partner and cousin, had not peeped anxiously in at the door. “They said you’d gone away and then come back. I thought I’d just ask if anything was the matter,” he excused himself to the master mind.
“The matter is, we’ve got hold of the most wonderful human document—good God, yes, and soul document!—that any house in this country or any other has ever published!” The words burst out from Sibley like bullets from a mitrailleuse.
Denin hardly knew what to think of the telegram which came next morning. It asked him to call at once on Mr. Sibley; but Denin, warned that the manuscript story could not be read for a week or more, did not dream that the publisher had already raced through it. His fear was that a mere glance at the first page had been enough, showing the skilled critic that the work lacked literary value; or else that the bulk was insufficient to make a book. Mr. Sibley might, in kindness, wish to end the author’s suspense, and put him out of misery.
When the message arrived, Denin was reading and marking newspaper advertisements. He meant to go without delay to several places of business that offered more or less suitable work; but he was ready to risk missing any chance, no matter how good, when the fate of his ewe lamb was at stake. He was too despondent at the thought of its rejection to plan placing it elsewhere, but he could not bear to lose time in reclaiming it.
He felt, as he was led once more into Sibley’s private office, as if he had to face a painful operation without anesthetics, so sensitive had he come to be on the subject of his story—the manuscript of his heart, written in the blood of his sacrifice. There lay the familiar pages on the desk, all ready, he did not doubt, to be wrapped up and handed back to him. He had so schooled himself to a refusal that the publisher’s first words made his head swim. He could not believe that he heard aright.
“Well, Mr. Sanbourne, I congratulate you!” Sibley said, getting up from his desk-chair and holding out a cordial hand. “We congratulate ourselves on the chance of publishing your book.”
Denin took the hand held out and moved it up and down mechanically, but did not speak. Following the publisher’s extreme graciousness his silence might have seemed boorish, but Sibley knew how to interpret it. He realized that the other was struck dumb, and he felt a thrill of romantic delight in the situation, in his own august power to confer benefits. He was not conducting himself as a business man in this case, but he knew by sureness of instinct that the strange amateur would take no mean advantage of his confessed enthusiasm.
“We think,” he went on, “that you have written something very original and very beautiful. Without being sentimental, it’s full of that kind of indescribable sentiment which goes straight to the heart. It will be a short book, only about fifty thousand words, or even less; but that doesn’t matter, because a word added or a word left out would make a false note. The thing’s an inspiration. You’ve got a big success before you. You ought to be a happy man, Mr. Sanbourne.”
“You make me feel as if I were in a dream,” said Denin.
“That’s the way your story has made me feel,” said Sibley. “Really, your method has an extraordinary effect. Talking of dreams, it’s almost as if you’d written the whole story in some strange, inspired dream.”
“Perhaps I did write it so,” Denin said, more as if he spoke to himself than to another. “I had no method—consciously. The story just came.”
“One feels that, and it’s the most compelling part of its charm,” said Sibley. “Well, now I’ve paid you your due of appreciation. Sit down, and let us talk business.”
“Business?” Denin echoed, rather stupidly. But he accepted the chair his host offered, and Sibley too sat down.
“Yes, business,” the publisher cheerily repeated. “We should like to rush the book out as soon as possible. It’s too late to have it set up and given to our spring travelers to take round and show to the trade—which is one of the most valuable ways of advertising, I assure you. But in an immense country like America that means months of traveling before a book appears. Yours has a specially poignant interest at the moment, and I have so much faith in its power that I believe it can advertise itself. Of course I don’t mean that we won’t give it big publicity in the newspapers. We shall spread ourselves in that way, and spend a lot of money.”
“And can you get the book out soon in England, too?” asked Denin.
“Oh, yes. We’ll produce here and there simultaneously, and do it in a record rush, if you can promise to stay on the spot and read proofs.”
“I’ll do whatever you wish,” said Denin.
“Now about the question of money,” Sibley went on, exquisitely and literally “enjoying himself.” “Some people call me hard as nails, a regular skinflint. And so I am, with those who try to squeeze me. I don’t think you’ll have any such complaint to make. Your name is unknown, but I believe in your book and I want to be generous with you. What do you say to an advance payment of three thousand dollars, with fifteen per cent. royalty for the first ten thousand sales, and twenty per cent. after that?”
“But,” stammered Denin, astounded. “I told you yesterday I didn’t want payment. That was true, what I said then. It would seem a kind of sacrilege to take money for such a book—a book I wrote because I wanted to—”
“I don’t see that at all,” Sibley cut in dryly. “You are the first author I—or any other publisher, I should think—ever had to urge to accept hard cash. But you’re probably an exception to a good many rules! We can’t take your book as a present, you know! So if you want it published you’ll have to come round to our terms.”
“You mean that?” asked Denin. “You won’t bring out my story if I refuse your money?”
“I do mean that, though I should hate to sacrifice the book. And I honestly believe that many people would be happier for reading it.”
“Very well then,” Denin answered. “I’ll accept the money and thank you for it. I want my book to come out, more than I want anything else—that—that can possibly happen.”
To a man who had lived from hand to mouth as John Sanbourne had since Sir John Denin died, three thousand dollars seemed something like a fortune. He had lost his old sense of proportion in life, and had almost forgotten how it felt to have all the money he wanted. Perhaps he forgot more easily than most men of his class, for he had never cared greatly for the things which money alone can buy. His tastes had always seemed to his friends ridiculously simple, so simple as to be dangerously near affectation; and as a small boy he had announced firmly that he would “rather be a gardener in a beautiful garden, than one of those millionaires who have to do their business always in towns.” Now, when he had recovered from the first shock of accepting money for the book of his heart, he began to reflect how to plan his life. The thought that he could have a garden was a real incentive, for working in a garden would save him from the unending desolation of uselessness, when the last proofs were corrected and there was no longer any work to do on his story.
Barbara and Mrs. Fay had both talked to John Denin about their old home in California, and with the knowledge that he could afford it a keen wish was suddenly born in John Sanbourne to make some kind of a home for himself in the country where Barbara had lived. She was named, her mother had told him, after Santa Barbara. The girl had been born near Santa Barbara, and had grown up there to the age of thirteen, when her father had died and their place had been sold. After that, the mother and daughter had gone to Paris. Denin recalled with crystal clearness all the girl’s warm, eager picturing of her old home, for he remembered scenery and even descriptions of scenery with greater distinctness than he remembered faces. He had often thought (until he met Barbara, and fell in love) that he cared more for nature and places and things than he could ever care for people, except those of his very own flesh and blood. He knew differently now, but it seemed to him that he would be nearer finding peace in Barbara’s home-country than anywhere else in the world.
There was no danger that she or her mother might some day appear and meet him face to face, to the ruin of Barbara’s dream of happiness with Trevor d’Arcy. Mother and daughter had said that they never wished to go back, now that the old ties were broken. When occasionally they returned to America, they spent their time in Washington and New York; but with Barbara married to Trevor d’Arcy, and mistress in her own right of Gorston Old Hall, all interests would combine to keep mother and daughter in England. John Denin’s ghost might, if it chose, safely haunt the birthplace of his lost love.
The day that the last proof-sheet of “The War Wedding” was corrected, Sanbourne said good-by to Eversedge Sibley and started for California. He could not afford to travel by the Limited or any of the fast trains, so there were many changes and waits for him, and he was nearly a week on the way; but when a man has lost or thrown over the best things in his life there is the consolation that none of its small hardships seem to matter. Besides, he had Santa Barbara to look forward to; and Denin told himself that, things being as they were, he was lucky to have anything to look forward to at all.
When he reached the end of the journey at last it was almost like coming to a place he had known in dreams, so clearly did he recognize the mountains whose lovely shapes crowded towards the sea. Barbara had all their names by heart and treasured their photographs. He remembered her stories of the islands, too, floating on the horizon like boats at anchor; and the trails of golden kelp seen through the green transparence of the waves, like the hair of sleeping mermaids. In the same way he knew the big hotel with its mile-long drive bordered with flaming geraniums; he knew the old town and—without asking—how to go from there to the Mission. Also he knew that, on the way to the Mission, he would find the place which Barbara had cared for most until she fell in love—not with him—but with Gorston Old Hall.
He limped perceptibly still, and could not walk far without pain, so he decided to be extravagant for the first time since “coming into his money” and hire a small, cheap motor-car. It was driven by its small, cheap owner, a young man with a ferocious fund of information about Santa Barbara, and every one who had ever lived there.
“Heard of the Fay place?” he echoed Denin’s first question. “Well, I should smile! Why, me and Barbie Fay are about the same age,” he plunged on, so violently that no interruption could have stopped him. “Not that we were in the same set. Not much! But a cat can look at a king. And any boy can look at any girl, I guess. Gee! That little girl was some worth lookin’ at! Her mother thought she was too good for us plain Americans, so she took her off to Europe and clapped her in a convent, after the old man died. They’ve never been back this way since, nor won’t be now. The girl’s been married twice, I was readin’ in the papers. Once to some English lord or other who left her the same day, and got himself killed in France; and the second time, just a few weeks ago, to a cousin on her mother’s side—a Britisher, too. There was an interview with the mother in the San Francisco Call, I saw. One of our California journalists over there in the war-zone got it—quite a good scoop. Mrs. Fay said it was an old romance between Barbie and this Captain-What’s-his-name. But we never seen him here. I guess he’s English, root and branch. Good thing for that ‘old romance’ they could make sure the other chap was killed all right, all right, wasn’t it? Some of them poor fellows gets blown to bits so you can’t tell one from t’ other, they say. But the girl’s mother mentioned to our Call reporter, that they knew the husband’s body by a stylograph pen in a gold case, which was her own last present to him. If it hadn’t been for that little thing, found in a rag or two left of the feller’s coat, Barbie wouldn’t have dast married again, I bet. Say, that’s one of them anecdotes they put under the heading of ‘Too Strange not to be True!’ ain’t it?”
“Yes, it is strange,” Denin repeated mechanically. It was strange, too—above all strange—that he should have had to come to Barbara’s birthplace to learn this detail casually. A thousand times he had wondered how they had identified John Denin’s body with enough certainty to take it back to England and give it a funeral with military honors. Perhaps, if he had not come to Santa Barbara and in Santa Barbara happened to stumble upon this loquacious fellow with the motor-car to hire, he might have gone through all the rest of his life without knowing. And another strange thing was that he had lent the stylographic pen—Mrs. Fay’s last present—to a man who wanted to write a letter just before the battle. That man, who had been killed, was possibly still reported “missing,” while John Denin’s wife, assured of his death by a peculiarly intimate clue, had been able to take her happiness without fear. If Barbara’s mother had not given him the pen, he would not now be numbered among the dead, but would have been free to go back to his wife of an hour, and perhaps even teach her to love him in the end.
Well, all that didn’t bear thinking of now! He tried, as he had tried a hundred times—but never so poignantly—to hold in his heart the memory of flaming happiness worth all the pain of living through the burnt-out years: the happiness he had put into the pages of his “War Wedding.”
With some people who had known Barbara he would have liked to talk of her, but not with this crude youth who spouted her praises from a mouth full of chewing gum. Denin answered a pointed question of the chauffeur’s by saying that he had enquired about the Fay place because he heard it was worth seeing. He might like to buy a little property somewhere near if it could be got.
“You bet it can be got!” was the prompt answer. “That is, if you want something little enough, you can get a bit of the old Fay property itself.”
“Really?” said Denin. “I thought it was all disposed of years ago.”
“So it was. Eight years ago and a bit. I remember because I made an errand to sneak down to the depot and see Barbie go off in the train, as pretty as a white rose, dressed in black for her pa. I was only a cub of fourteen. An old feller from the East, staying at the Potter, went crazy about the place and bought it at Mrs. Fay’s own price. (Lucky for her! They say she’d nothing else to live on!) Feller by the name of Samuel Drake. He was out in California for his bronchitis or something, and took a fancy to the country. He wanted his married son with a young bride to live with him, so he got a real bright idea. I suppose the folks who told you about the Fay place never said nothing about a kind of little playhouse called the Mirador (Spanish for view-place or look-out, I guess), built at one end of the property that fronts to the sea?”
“I—rather think they did mention something of the kind,” said Denin. The first time he had ever seen Barbara, at a dance soon after she was presented, she had happened to speak of the Mirador. It was a miniature house which her father had built for her at her favorite view point, as a birthday surprise, when she was ten. There was an “upstairs and a downstairs,” a bath, and a “tiny, tiny kitchen” where she had been supposed to do her own cooking. In the sitting-room she had had lessons with her governess. The one upstairs room, with its wonderful view of the bay and the islands, had been turned into a bedroom for her, when she had scarlet fever and had to be isolated with a nurse. She had “loved getting well there, and lying in her hammock on the balcony with curtains of roses.”
“Old man Drake had the smart notion of putting on a couple more rooms in a wing at the back, and offering it to his son and his son’s bride,” the driver of the car was explaining, over the motor’s cheap clatter. “But while the work was going on, the new beams caught fire one night (I guess some tramp could tell why) and the whole addition and a bit of the original burnt down. Just then the son changed his plans anyhow, and decided to go into business with his wife’s folks in the East. That sort of sickened the old man, so he let the Mirador fall into rack and ruin; and now he spends about three quarters of his time in Boston with the son. I guess he’s sorry he was in such a hurry to buy the Fay place. Anyways, he won’t spend money on the Mirador, but rather than it should stay the way it is, he’ll sell it in its present condition with enough ground to make a garden. The thing looks like a burnt bird’s nest—except for the flowers, and the house ain’t much bigger than a baby doll’s house. I suppose it wouldn’t suit you, would it?”
“Perhaps it might,” answered Denin, trying to speak calmly. But in his heart he meant to have Barbara’s Mirador if it cost him every penny he had left from his advance on “The War Wedding.” It was almost as if, to atone for taking herself out of his life, Barbara had given him this dear plaything of her childhood to remember her by.
“Well, you’ll be able to make up your mind,” said his guide, slowing down the rattletrap car. “Here we are at the Fay place, now—or the Drake place, as maybe I ought to call it—and there’s the Mirador. No wonder old Drake wants to get it fixed up again! The way it is now, it spoils the look of the whole property.”
The “Fay place” gave a first impression of having been an orange plantation transformed into a vast garden. There were acres and acres of land, Denin could not guess how many. In the midst of orange trees in fruit and blossom, and pepper trees shedding coral, and tall palm trees with long gray beards which were last year’s fronds, stood the big, rambling pink bungalow that had been Barbara’s home. Its tiled roof and wide loggias were just visible from the road; but the Mirador, to which the driver pointed, was in plain sight. Denin’s heart bounded. He almost expected to see a young girl with smoke-blue eyes and copper-beech hair (it had been red in those days, she’d told him) open one of the shuttered windows and look out with a smile.
Once, while she and her mother were staying at Gorston Old Hall, he had tried to teach Barbara chess. In the midst of a game which she hoped to win, she suddenly saw herself facing defeat. “Let’s begin again, and play it all over!” she had cried out, laughing.
Ah, if they could do that now: begin again, and play the game all over!
Well, the ghost of John Denin could begin to play hero with the ghost of Barbara Fay’s childhood, when he came to have his home in her old playhouse. He knew that this must and should be his home, now that he had come and seen the place and felt its influence even more subtly than he had thought to feel it. He could not get through his shorn life anywhere else.
The Mirador was distant at least four acres from the house. It too was pink, like the parent bungalow, or it had once been pink, before the fire which destroyed the addition for servants at the back had marred the rose color of its plastered adobe walls. A roof of Spanish tiles dropped low like a visor, giving cover to the balcony of the upper story; and the floor of that balcony roofed the one below. On each of these balconies only one window—which was also a door—looked out; but it was a huge window, with green exterior shutters; and the stout, square columns of the two verandas were almost hidden with roses, passion-flower, and convolvulus which had either survived the fire or grown up since. Though the front was so nearly intact, from each side of the little house could be seen the blackened wreck of burnt beams; and to screen the parent bungalow from any possible glimpse of this eyesore, a high barrier of trellis-work had been erected about two hundred feet distant from the Mirador. Over this barrier some quick-climbing creepers had been trained, and they had grown in such thick masses that an almost impenetrable green wall had already grown up between the big house and the tiny one.
“This will suit me exactly,” said Denin, trying to speak coolly. “We’ll drive back at once, please, to the agent who has the selling of the Mirador.”
·····
He was almost afraid to hear the price, lest his last dollar might not suffice to secure the treasure. But the agent in whose hands “old Drake” had put his business named the sum of two thousand dollars. This, he said, was a mere song for land so near Santa Barbara; and, no doubt, he was right. But it was a large slice of John Sanbourne’s capital, and left him only a small remnant for repairing the place, as he must agree to do before the contract could be signed.
The journey from New York had cost a good deal, and—he must live somehow, unless he could get work fitted for a “lame dog” to do. Mr. Sibley had talked vaguely of “royalties,” but it seemed impossible to Denin that many people should actually care to buy his book—the strange little book written for himself, and sent wandering out into the world to find Barbara. Even if people did buy it, the sales could surely never go beyond the three thousand dollars Eversedge Sibley had recklessly pressed upon him in advance! However, Denin did not hesitate for any of these reasons. “I’ll buy the Mirador and the acre and a half of ground Mr. Drake is willing to sell with it,” he said to the agent. “And I’d like to pay for it if possible and settle up everything to-day. Then I could move into the house at once.”
The agent stared. “There’s no furniture,” he said.
“I can get in enough to begin with, in an hour or two, surely,” Denin persisted. “I’m used to roughing it.”
The other could well believe that, from the look of the queer fellow! As a business man, he would certainly not accept a check, and would be inclined to ask expert opinion even on bank notes, paid by an unknown client with such scars, and such clothes, and in such a hurry!
“You could hardly live in the house while the repairs you must agree to are being made,” the agent reminded the would-be buyer. “Don’t you think you had better—”
“I can manage all right,” Denin cut short the advice. “As for the repairs, I shall make them of course. What Mr. Drake asks is for the house to be restored to its former appearance (aren’t those the words?) not enlarged. Well, I must tell you frankly that I can’t afford to pay for labor. I will guarantee to make the Mirador look just as it used to look, and do it all with my own hands. I can’t work very fast, because—you can see, I’ve been disabled. But I shall have an incentive to finish as soon as possible, if I’m actually living in the house.”
“You had a severe accident, I suppose?” the curious agent could not resist suggesting.
“It was—in a way—an accident,” said Denin, and his smile was rather grim.
When he had paid for the place, had bought materials for restoring the house and improving the garden, had collected a few bits of furniture and added some other necessaries, the owner of the Mirador had only seven hundred dollars left out of his fortune. Nor did he at that time know how he was to earn more dollars. Nevertheless he had come as near to be being content as he could ever hope to be in this world. He had given his own old home to Barbara, and there was no place for memories of him there. But she had given her old home to him (unconsciously, it was true; yet it seemed to be her gift) and memories of Barbara would be his companions each hour of the day. Besides, he had the task of restoring every marred feature of the little Mirador exactly as she had described it to him. He bought a ladder and plaster and paint, and did mason’s work and painter’s work with a good will. In the four rooms which were more or less intact—bedroom, sitting-room, miniature kitchen and bath—he put a few odds and ends of second-hand furniture, enough for a hermit. And when his labor of love on the house was accomplished, he set to work in the garden. Some day, he told himself, he should find in the garden the greatest solace of all.
In his deep absorption, he forgot the book for days on end. Even in his dreams he did not remember it, for in the room where Barbara had lain ill with scarlet fever, dreams lent her to him, a childish Barbara, very kind and sweet. He knew the date on which the book was to come out, but he had lost count by a day or two, therefore it was a shock of surprise to open a parcel which arrived one morning by post, and to see six purple volumes. On each cover, in gold lettering, was printed “The War Wedding: John Sanbourne.”
His hand shook a little as he opened the front page, and began to read. Strange, how poignantly real the story was in this form, more real even than when he had written it, or read it over in manuscript that first day in New York many weeks ago now. He went on and on, and could not stop. There was no servant in the Mirador to look after his wants, and so he had no food till evening; none until he had finished the book, and had walked for a long time in the garden, thinking it all over with passionate revival of interest. After that night the book again shared his dreams with Barbara. Sometimes in dreaming, he saw Barbara reading the story; but when he waked, he said to himself there were ten chances against one that she would ever hear of it.
When “The War Wedding” in volume form was about a fortnight or three weeks old, a thick envelope full of American press cuttings arrived for “Mr. John Sanbourne,” from Eversedge Sibley and Company. Every critic, even those of the most important newspapers; praised the work of the unknown author with enthusiasm. A notice signed by a famous name said, “In reading this story, told with a limpid simplicity almost unique in the annals of story-writing, one forgets the printed page and feels that one is listening to a voice: not an ordinary voice, but the voice of a disembodied soul which has forgotten nothing of this existence and has already learned much about the next: a philosopher of crystal clearness and inspiring serenity.”
Nearly all the criticisms had something in them of the same curious exaltation of mood. The writers asked: “Who is John Sanbourne, that he can work this spell upon us?” And one said, “Whoever he is, he is bound to get post-bags full of ‘appreciations’ from half the women in the world, and a good many men.”
A letter from Sibley was enclosed with the cuttings, congratulating the author. “This is only the first batch,” he wrote, “but it’s a phenomenally big one for this short time. Evidently these hardened critics shared my weakness. When they began the book they couldn’t put it down till the end, and then they had to relieve their pent-up feelings by dashing them onto paper at white heat. Many of these reviews, as you’ll see by the date, appeared on the day after publication, most of the others on that following. Such opinions by such critics in such papers have sold the book like hot cakes. Luckily we expected a huge demand, or we should already be unable to supply it. Thanks to our foresight we have a second and third big edition ready, and an immense fourth one in the press. We have heard by cable that our history over here is repeating itself in England. The exact wording is, ‘Reviews and orders unprecedented.’ You will be getting offers from all the publishers for your next work, but we hope you’ll be true to us. I am in earnest when I speak of this, for if I am interviewed, I should like to be able to say, ‘Mr. Sanbourne has already an idea for another book which we hope to publish about a year from now.’ That will keep them remembering you! Not that they’re likely to forget for awhile. They’ll be too busy crying—the women, I mean, and I shouldn’t consider a man safe without his handkerchief. Please wire about the new book. Also whether we are at liberty to answer the numerous journalistic questions we’re getting about you, with any personal details, or whether you prefer to hide behind a veil of mystery. I’m not sure myself which is preferable.”
But Sanbourne was very sure. He left his garden work to walk to Santa Barbara and send a telegram.
“Say nothing about me to any one, please, except that I shall never write another book.”
PART II
THE LETTERS
John Sanbourne had smiled when he read the critic’s prophecy that he was “bound to get letters of appreciation from half the women in the world,” and he had thought no more of the comic suggestion until the letters began to come. But the letters were not comic.
They were forwarded in large packets by Sibley and Company, and there were many, incredibly many of them; some from men, but mostly from women. The writers felt impelled to tell the author of “The War Wedding” what a wonderful book they thought it was, or how much good it had done them in their different states of mind. These states the readers of Sanbourne’s book described almost as penitents confessing to a priest detail their sins. And the strange confidences, or pitiful pleadings for advice and help from one who “seemed to know such glorious truths about life and death,” were desperately pathetic to Denin. He was utterly amazed and overwhelmed by this phase of his unlooked-for success, and knew not how to cope with it.
The first thousand and more letters were all from people in the United States. Then letters from Canada began drifting in. At last, when “The War Wedding” had been on sale and selling edition after edition for eight weeks, a rather smaller parcel than usual arrived from the publishers. Denin, who was in the garden, took it from the postman, at the new gate which led to the Mirador. It was in the morning, and he had been gathering late roses; for every day he decorated with her favorite blossoms the two principal rooms of the house which child-Barbara had loved. He had a big pair of scissors in his hand; and sitting down on a bench, in the cool strip of shade that ran the length of the lower balcony, he cut the string which fastened the packet. This he did, not because he was impatient to see what it contained, but because he was warm and tired after two hours of garden work and wanted an excuse to rest. The letters of so many sad women who begged for counsel that he knew not how to give, were having a shattering effect upon his nerves. He had not supposed that there were so many tragic souls of women in the world, outside the war-zone, and he dreaded the details of their lives. Sometimes he was half tempted to put the letters away or destroy them, unread.
There was a vague hope in his mind that this parcel might have something other than letters in it: but as the shears bit the tightly tied string, the stout linen envelope burst open and began to disgorge its contents: letters—letters—letters!
Between his feet John Sanbourne had placed the basket of roses; and the letters, falling out of the big envelope, began to drop onto the green leaves and crêpy-crisp blooms of pink and white and cream.
“English stamps!” he said aloud—for the habit had grown upon him of talking to himself. Bending down to pick up the letters, a dark flush streamed to his forehead. There was one envelope of the same texture, the same gray-blue tint, and the same long, narrow shape that Sir John Denin had liked and always used at Gorston Old Hall. It had fallen face downward; and as he rescued it from a fragrant bath of dew, he slowly turned it over. There was an English stamp upon this envelope also, and it was addressed to “John Sanbourne, Esq., care of Messrs. Eversedge Sibley and Company,” in Barbara’s handwriting.
For an instant everything went black, just as it had done months ago when he had got on his feet too suddenly in hospital. He shut his eyes, and leaned back with his head against the house wall—the wall of Barbara’s Mirador. It was as if he could hear her voice speaking to him across six thousand miles of land and sea. But it spoke to John Sanbourne, not to John Denin.
“My God—she’s read the book. She’s written!”
He had to say the words over to himself before he could make the thing seem credible.
And even then he did not open the letter. He dreaded to open it, and sat very still and rigid, grasping the envelope as if it were an electric battery of which he could not let go.
What if she hated the book? What if she wrote, as a woman who had been twice a war bride, to say that a subject such as he had chosen was too sacred to put into print? What if she felt bound to reproach the author for treading brutally on holy ground?
If that was what the letter had to say to him, his message of peace had failed, and all his patched-up scheme of existence broke down in that one failure.
The thought that he was a coward shrinking from a blow nerved him to open the letter. He was on the point of tearing the envelope, but he could not be rough with a thing Barbara had touched, nor could he deface it. He took up the scissors and cut off one end of the envelope, then drew out a sheet of the familiar gray-blue paper. Unfolding it, his hands trembled. All the rest of his life, such as it was, he felt, hung on what he was about to read.
The letter began abruptly. “You must have many letters from strangers, but none will bring you more gratitude than this. If you are like your book, you are too generous to be bored by grateful words from people whose sore hearts you helped to heal, so I won’t apologize. You could not write as you do, I think, if you didn’t want to do good to others. Will you then help me, even more than you have helped me already, by answering a question I am going to ask? Will you tell me whether the wonderful things you say, to comfort those of us who are losing our dearest in battle, are just inspired thoughts, or whether you have yourself been very near death, so near that you caught a vision from the other side? If you answer me, and if you say that actual experience gave you this knowledge, your book—which has already been like a strong hand dragging me up from the depths—will become a beautiful message meant especially for me out of all the whole world, making all my future life bearable.
“Every night for months I’ve gone to bed unable to sleep, because I’ve felt exactly as if my brain were a battlefield, full of the agony and hopelessness of brave men dying violent and dreadful deaths, cut off in the midst of youth, with the stories of their lives tragically unfinished. But since I read in your book that marvelous scene with those suddenly released spirits—young men of both sides, friends and enemies, meeting and talking to each other, saying, ‘Is this all?’ ‘Is this the worst that death can do to us?’ why, I seem to pass beyond the battlefield! I go with those happy, surprised young men who are seeing for the first time the great ‘reality behind the thing’ and a feeling of rest and immense peace comes to me. I don’t keep it long at a time. I can’t, yet. But if you write and say you know, I think I may some day learn to keep it.
“I have the English edition of your book, but I have read in a newspaper an extract from the interview a journalist had with the publisher in New York. You see, everybody who has some one dear in the war, or has lost some one beloved, is reading and talking of the book. They all want to know things about you, but perhaps not all for as real a reason as mine. Some people have said that perhaps the author may be a woman, who chooses to write under a man’s name. I felt sure from the first it couldn’t be so, for only a man could say those things as you say them; but I was glad of your publisher’s assurance that you are a man, and that your home now is in the far West in America. Perhaps I shouldn’t have dared write you if you were in this country, because—but no, I needn’t explain.
“My name can be of no interest to you, yet I will sign it.
“Yours gratefully, Barbara Denin.”
“Barbara Denin.” ... She had kept his name!
Many a woman did (he was aware) after a second marriage continue to use the name of her first husband, in order to retain a title. But all he knew of the girl Barbara Fay made it amazing to him that she should hold to the name of a man she had never loved, after becoming the wife of a man she had loved since childhood.
A wild doubt set his brain on fire. Could there have been some terrible misunderstanding? Was it possible that after all she had never married Trevor d’Arcy? ... Carried away on the flame of passion fanned by her letter, Denin told himself that it might be so, and that if she were free he would still have the right to go back to her. If she had not given herself to another man she belonged to him, to him alone, and she would not hate him if he explained the sacrifice he had made for her sake.
He was on his feet before he knew what he was doing. The blinding hope lit body and soul as with some curative ray beyond the ultra violet. It shot, through his worn frame, life and abounding health, making of him for a magical moment more than the man he had been a year ago. But it was only a moment; indeed, less than a moment. For it did not take him sixty seconds to remember how he had heard of Barbara’s marriage to her cousin Captain d’Arcy. Walter Severne the airman had said that her wedding had taken place on the same day with his own. Severne had blamed her. Every word he had said was branded on Denin’s brain. There could be no mistake. Whatever the motive might be for signing herself Barbara Denin, she was in all certainty d’Arcy’s wife.
With the violent reaction of feeling came a sense of physical disintegration. A heavy fatigue that weighted his heart and turned his bones to iron followed the brief buoyancy of spirit. Yet he could not rest. He had to walk, to keep in constant movement, to escape some tidal wave which threatened suddenly to engulf his soul. He passed out from the cool shadow of the balcony into the blaze of sunlight and drank in the hot perfume of the flowers. At the end of a path a tall cypress held its black, burnt-out torch high against the sky. Denin went and leaned against it; doubly glad of his loneliness in this refuge he had found, and thankful that none but the trees and flowers of his garden could see him in his weakness and his pain.
The dark cypress he looked up to seemed to have gone through fire and to have triumphed over death. Denin felt a kind of kinship with it, wishing that from the tree and from all nature calmness and strength might pass into his spirit. He imagined that he could hear the rushing of sap deep under the rough bark. Generations of joys and sorrows had come and gone since the tree was young, and had vanished, leaving no more trace than sun or storm. So it would be with what he was suffering now. The things that mattered in the life of this earth were strength and steadfastness. Denin prayed for them, a voiceless prayer to Nature.
When he grew calmer he walked again, and lifted up his face to the sun. “I’ll answer her letter,” he thought. It seemed strange to him now, after the shock of what had happened, that when the letters began to come, he had never imagined himself receiving one from Barbara. He had had the book published in order that it might have some chance of reaching her, of helping her; yet the proof that she had been reached and helped had come upon him like a thunderbolt.
Of course he was thankful, now that he put it to himself in such a way. He ought to be almost happy, he tried to think; but he was at the world’s end from happiness. A hurricane had swept through his soul, and it would take him a long time to build up again the miserable little refuge which had been his house of peace. Still, it didn’t matter about himself. He would write to Barbara, and give her the assurance she asked for. He was glad now of a whim that had led him to learn typewriting two or three years ago, for he could not trust to disguising his hand so well that she might not recognize it. It was many months since he had practiced typing, but he thought that in a few hours he might again pick up the trick which he could not quite have lost.
Rather than let himself think any longer, he went out at once, walking to the town, where he bought a small typewriter of a new make. Its lettering was in script, which seemed less offensive and coldly businesslike for a letter than print. Back again at the Mirador he tried the machine, and sooner than he had expected the old facility returned. Then he was ready to begin his answer to Barbara; but for a long time he sat with his fingers on the keys, his eyes fixed upon them aimlessly. It was not that he could find nothing to say. He could find too many things, and too many ways of saying those things. But all were expressions of thoughts which he might not put on paper for Barbara to read.
Even after he began to type, he took page after page out of the machine and tore up each one. Vaguely he felt that the right way was to be laconic; that he ought to show no emotion, lest he should show too much. Finally he finished a few paragraphs which he knew to be lame and halting, like himself, stiff and altogether inadequate. Yet he was sure that he would be able to do no better, and so he determined to send his letter off as it was.
“You say you are grateful to me,” Denin began as abruptly as Barbara had begun in writing to him, “but it is for me to be grateful to you really, for speaking as you do of my story, ‘The War Wedding.’ I am answering your letter the day it has reached me, because you are anxious to have a reply to your question. It is what you wished it might be. I have been very near to death, so near that I seemed to see across, to the other side of what we think of as a gulf. If I saw aright, it is not a gulf.... Those voices of young men passing suddenly over in crowds, I thought, I believed, and still believe I heard. I can almost hear them now, because one does not forget such things if one comes back. I trust this answer may be of some comfort to you; and if you can feel, as you say you will feel, that my book has a message especially for you, I shall be very glad and proud.
“Yours sincerely, John Sanbourne.”
When he re-read the typed letter, one point struck him which had not so sharply pierced his intelligence before. The effect of the appeal from Barbara, the miracle of its coming, and the poignant obligation it thrust upon him had been too overpowering at first. He had not stopped, after breaking short his wild hope of her freedom, to dwell on the strangeness of one part of her letter above another. But now, in judging his own phrases, he came to a stop at a sentence towards the end of the page: “I trust this may be of some comfort to you.”
“Won’t that way of putting it sound conceited?” he asked himself. But no; she had used that very word “comfort” in her letter. As he remembered this, the thought suddenly woke in him that she had written as a woman might write who was in deep sorrow. Yet she could not be in deep sorrow. She had her heart’s desire, and at worst, her feeling for the man who was gone—John Denin—could only be a mild, impersonal grief that his life had to be the price of her happy love.
He had longed, in writing the story of “The War Wedding,” to show Barbara why even that mild grief was not needed, because in giving great joy to another soul a woman earned the right to her own happiness. Denin could not bear to think that pity for him might shadow Barbara’s sunshine, but he had not dreamed until to-day that the shadow could be dark. Now, the more intently he studied her appeal to the author of the book, the more difficult he found it to understand her state of mind.
Barbara spoke of herself as one of the many women whose “sore hearts” ached for healing because they were losing their “dearest” in battle. And she said that, if he could give her the assurance she asked for, the story of “The War Wedding” would seem to hold a personal message, making her “future life bearable.”
What a generous and sensitive nature she had, and what beautiful loyalty, to mourn sincerely for a man she had never loved, but to whom she owed a few material advantages! It was wonderful of the girl, and he worshiped her for it. His sacrifice for her was easier because of this warm sense of her gratitude, and he kissed the paper he had just written on for her, because some day it would be touched by her hands.
“If I only dared to say more to comfort her, and beg her to be happy!” he thought. But the one safe way had been to make his answer to her calmly impersonal, perhaps even a little cold. For fear he might be seized with an irresistible desire to add something more, something from his heart instead of his head, Denin put the letter into an envelope and sealed it.
Then, however, he stumbled upon a new difficulty which had not occurred to him before. He was in the act of addressing her as “Lady Denin” (since she chose to keep his name), when his heart stood still in the face of a danger he had barely escaped.
How was a stranger like John Sanbourne to know that she was Lady Denin?
If, inadvertently, he had written the name thus, and sent the letter to the post, even so slight a thing might have made her guess the truth. Instead of comforting, he might have plunged her into humiliation and despair.
Barbara had not spoken of herself in the letter as being married. For all John Sanbourne was supposed to know, she might be a girl, mourning a brother or a lover. At last he addressed her as “Mrs. or Miss Denin, Gorston Old Hall.” And with several other letters which he forced himself to write, he enclosed the stamped envelope in a note to Eversedge Sibley. “Please post these in New York,” he begged. “I don’t care to have every one know where I live.”