Castle Nowhere Part 7

No color deepened in her fair face under his ardent gaze; and, after a moment, he released her, almost roughly. The next day he told old Fog that he was going.

'Where.'

'Somewhere, this time. I've had enough of Nowhere.'

'Why do you go?'

'Do you want the plain truth, old man? Here it is, then; I am growing too fond of that girl,--a little more and I shall not be able to leave her.'

'Then stay; she loves you.'

'A child's love.'

'She will develop--'

'Not into my wife if I know myself,' said Waring, curtly.

Old Fog sat silent a moment. 'Is she not lovely and good?' he said in a low voice.

'She is; but she is your daughter as well.'

'She is not.'

'She is not! What then?'.

'I--I do not know; I found her, a baby, by the wayside.'

'A foundling! So much the better, that is even a step lower,' said the younger man, laughing roughly. And the other crept away as though he had been struck.

Waring set about his preparations. This time Silver did not suspect his purpose. She had pa.s.sed out of the quick, intuitive watchfulness of childhood. During these days she had taken up the habit of sitting by herself in the flower-room, ostensibly with her book or sewing; but when they glanced in through the open door, her hands were lying idle on her lap and her eyes fixed dreamily on some opening blossom. Hours she sat thus, without stirring.

Waring's plan was a wild one; no boat could sail through the ice, no foot could cross the wide rifts made by the thaw, and weeks of the bitterest weather still lay between them and the spring.

'Along-sh.o.r.e,' he said.

'And die of cold and hunger,' answered Fog.

'Old man, why are you not afraid of me?' said Waring, pausing in his work with a lowering glance. 'Am I not stronger than you, and the master, if I so choose, of your castle of logs?'

'But you will not so choose.'

'Do not trust me too far.'

'Do not trust you,--but G.o.d.'

'For a wrecker and murderer, you have, I must say, a remarkably serene conscience,' sneered Waring.

Again the old man shrank, and crept silently away.

But when in the early dawn a dark figure stood on the ice adjusting its knapsack, a second figure stole down the ladder. 'Will you go, then,' it said, 'and leave the child?'

'She is no child,' answered the younger man, sternly; 'and you know it.'

'To me she is.'

'I care not what she is to you; but she shall not be more to me.'

'More to you?'

'No more than any other pretty piece of wax-work,' replied Waring, striding away into the gray mist.

Silver came to breakfast radiant, her small head covered from forehead to throat with the winding braids of gold, her eyes bright, her cheeks faintly tinged with the icy water of her bath. 'Where is Jarvis?' she asked.

'Gone hunting,' replied old Fog.

'For all day?'

'Yes; and perhaps for all night. The weather is quite mild, you know.'

'Yes, papa. But I hope it will soon be cold again; he cannot stay out long then,' said the girl, gazing out over the ice with wistful eyes.

The danger was over for that day; but the next morning there it was again, and with it the bitter cold.

'He must come home soon now,' said Silver, confidently, melting the frost on one of the little windows so that she could see out and watch for his coming. But he came not. As night fell the cold grew intense; deadly, clear, and still, with the stars s.h.i.+ning brilliantly in the steel-blue of the sky. Silver wandered from window to window, wrapped in her fur mantle; a hundred times, a thousand times she had scanned the ice-fields and the snow, the lake and the sh.o.r.e. When the night closed down, she crept close to the old man who sat by the fire in silence, pretending to mend his nets, but furtively watching her every movement. 'Papa,' she whispered, 'where is he, where is he?' And her tears fell on his hands.

'Silver,' he said, bending over her tenderly, 'do I not love you? Am I not enough for you? Think, dear, how long we have lived here and how happy we have been. He was only a stranger. Come, let us forget him, and go back to the old days.'

'What! Has he gone, then? Has Jarvis gone?'

Springing to her feet she confronted him with clinched hands and dilated eyes. Of all the words she had heard but one; he had gone! The poor old man tried to draw her down again into the shelter of his arms, but she seemed turned to stone, her slender form was rigid.

'Where is he? Where is Jarvis? What have you done with him,--you, you!'

The quick unconscious accusation struck to his heart. 'Child,' he said in a broken voice, 'I tried to keep him. I would have given him my place in your love, in your life, but he would not. He has gone, he cares not for you; he is a hard, evil man.'

'He is not! But even if he were, I love him,' said the girl, defiantly.

Then she threw up her arms towards heaven (alas! it was no heaven to her, poor child) as if in appeal. 'Is there no one to help me?' she cried aloud.

'What can we do, dear?' said the old man, standing beside her and smoothing her hair gently. 'He would not stay,--I could not keep him!'

'I could have kept him.'

'You would not ask him to stay, if he wished to go?'

'Yes, I would; he must stay, for my sake.'

'But if he had loved you, dear, he would not have gone.'

'Did he say he did not love me?' demanded Silver, with gleaming eyes.