The Alaskan Part 18

"There must have been more than that," he persisted. "Some other reason."

"Two," she acknowledged, and now he noticed that with the dissolution of tears a flush of color was returning into her cheeks.

"And those--"

"One it is impossible for you to know; the other, if I tell you, will make you despise me. I am sure of that."

"It has to do with John Graham?"

She bowed her head. "Yes, with John Graham."

For the first time long lashes hid her eyes from him, and for a moment it seemed that her resolution was gone and she stood stricken by the import of the thing that lay behind his question; yet her cheeks flamed red instead of paling, and when she looked at him again, her eyes burned with a l.u.s.trous fire.

"John Graham," she repeated. "The man you hate and want to kill."

Slowly he turned toward the door. "I am leaving immediately after dinner to inspect the herds up in the foothills," he said. "And you--_are welcome here_."

He caught the swift intake of her breath as he paused for an instant at the door, and saw the new light that leaped into her eyes.

"Thank you, Alan Holt," she cried softly, "_Oh, I thank you!_!"

And then, suddenly, she stopped him with a little cry, as if at last something had broken away from her control. He faced her, and for a moment they stood in silence.

"I'm sorry--sorry I said to you what I did that night on the _Nome_,"

she said. "I accused you of brutality, of unfairness, of--of even worse than that, and I want to take it all back. You are big and clean and splendid, for you would go away now, knowing I am poisoned by an a.s.sociation with the man who has injured you so terribly, _and you say I am welcome!_ And I don't want you to go. You have made me _want_ to tell you who I am, and why I have come to you, and I pray G.o.d you will think as kindly of me as you can when you have heard."

CHAPTER XVIII

It seemed to Alan that in an instant a sudden change had come over the world. There was silence in the cabin, except for the breath which came like a sob to the girl's lips as she turned to the window and looked out into the blaze of golden sunlight that filled the tundra. He heard Tautuk's voice, calling to Keok away over near the reindeer corral, and he heard clearly Keok's merry laughter as she answered him. A gray-cheeked thrush flew up to the roof of Sokwenna's cabin and began to sing. It was as if these things had come as a message to both of them, relieving a tension, and significant of the beauty and glory and undying hope of life. Mary Standish turned from the window with s.h.i.+ning eyes.

"Every day the thrush comes and sings on our cabin roof," she said.

"It is--possibly--because you are here," he replied.

She regarded him seriously. "I have thought of that. You know, I have faith in a great many unbelievable things. I can think of nothing more beautiful than the spirit that lives in the heart of a bird. I am sure, if I were dying, I would like to have a bird singing near me.

Hopelessness cannot be so deep that bird-song will not reach it."

He nodded, trying to answer in that way. He felt uncomfortable. She closed the door which he had left partly open, and made a little gesture for him to resume the chair which he had left a few moments before. She seated herself first and smiled at him wistfully, half regretfully, as she said:

"I have been very foolish. What I am going to tell you now I should have told you aboard the _Nome_. But I was afraid. Now I am not afraid, but ashamed, terribly ashamed, to let you know the truth. And yet I am not sorry it happened so, because otherwise I would not have come up here, and all this--your world, your people, and you--have meant a great deal to me. You will understand when I have made my confession."

"No, I don't want that," he protested almost roughly. "I don't want you to put it that way. If I can help you, and if you wish to tell me as a friend, that's different. I don't want a confession, which would imply that I have no faith in you."

"And you have faith in me?"

"Yes; so much that the sun will darken and bird-song never seem the same if I lose you again, as I thought I had lost you from the s.h.i.+p."

"Oh, _you mean that_!"

The words came from her in a strange, tense, little cry, and he seemed to see only her eyes as he looked at her face, pale as the petals of the tundra daises behind her. With the thrill of what he had dared to say tugging at his heart, he wondered why she was so white.

"You mean that," her lips repeated slowly, "after all that has happened--even after--that part of a letter--which Stampede brought to you last night--"

He was surprised. How had she discovered what he thought was a secret between himself and Stampede? His mind leaped to a conclusion, and she saw it written in his face.

"No, it wasn't Stampede," she said. "He didn't tell me. It--just happened. And after this letter--you still believe in me?"

"I must. I should be unhappy if I did not. And I am--most perversely hoping for happiness. I have told myself that what I saw over John Graham's signature was a lie."

"It wasn't that--quite. But it didn't refer to you, or to me. It was part of a letter written to Rossland. He sent me some books while I was on the s.h.i.+p, and inadvertently left a page of this letter in one of them as a marker. It was really quite unimportant, when one read the whole of it. The other half of the page is in the toe of the slipper which you did not return to Ellen McCormick. You know that is the conventional thing for a woman to do--to use paper for padding in a soft-toed slipper."

He wanted to shout; he wanted to throw up his arms and laugh as Tautuk and Amuk Toolik and a score of others had laughed to the beat of the tom-toms last night, not because he was amused, but out of sheer happiness. But Mary Standish's voice, continuing in its quiet and matter-of-fact way, held him speechless, though she could not fail to see the effect upon him of this simple explanation of the presence of Graham's letter.

"I was in Nawadlook's room when I saw Stampede pick up the wad of paper from the floor," she was saying. "I was looking at the slipper a few minutes before, regretting that you had left its mate in my cabin on the s.h.i.+p, and the paper must have dropped then. I saw Stampede read it, and the shock that came in his face. Then he placed it on the table and went out. I hurried to see what he had found and had scarcely read the few words when I heard him returning. I returned the paper where he had laid it, hid myself in Nawadlook's room, and saw Stampede when he carried it to you. I don't know why I allowed it to be done. I had no reason. Maybe it was just--intuition, and maybe it was because--just in that hour--I so hated myself that I wanted someone to flay me alive, and I thought that what Stampede had found would make you do it. And I deserve it! I deserve nothing better at your hands."

"But it isn't true," he protested. "The letter was to Rossland."

There was no responsive gladness in her eyes. "Better that it were true, and all that _is_ true were false," she said in a quiet, hopeless voice. "I would almost give my life to be no more than what those words implied, dishonest, a spy, a criminal of a sort; almost any alternative would I accept in place of what I actually am. Do you begin to understand?"

"I am afraid--I can not." Even as he persisted in denial, the pain which had grown like velvety dew in her eyes clutched at his heart, and he felt dread of what lay behind it. "I understand--only--that I am glad you are here, more glad than yesterday, or this morning, or an hour ago."

She bowed her head, so that the bright light of day made a radiance of rich color in her hair, and he saw the sudden tremble of the s.h.i.+ning lashes that lay against her cheeks; and then, quickly, she caught her breath, and her hands grew steady in her lap.

"Would you mind--if I asked you first--to tell me _your_ story of John Graham?" she spoke softly. "I know it, a little, but I think it would make everything easier if I could hear it from you--now."

He stood up and looked down upon her where she sat, with the light playing in her hair; and then he moved to the window, and back, and she had not changed her position, but was waiting for him to speak. She raised her eyes, and the question her lips had formed was glowing in them as clearly as if she had voiced it again in words. A desire rose in him to speak to her as he had never spoken to another human being, and to reveal for her--and for her alone--the thing that had harbored itself in his soul for many years. Looking up at him, waiting, partial understanding softening her sweet face, a dusky glow in her eyes, she was so beautiful that he cried out softly and then laughed in a strange repressed sort of way as he half held out his arms toward her.

"I think I know how my father must have loved my mother," he said. "But I can't make you feel it. I can't hope for that. She died when I was so young that she remained only as a beautiful dream for me. But for my father she _never_ died, and as I grew older she became more and more alive for me, so that in our journeys we would talk about her as if she were waiting for us back home and would welcome us when we returned. And never could my father remain away from the place where she was buried very long at a time. He called it _home_, that little cup at the foot of the mountain, with the waterfall singing in summer, and a paradise of birds and flowers keeping her company, and all the great, wild world she loved about her. There was the cabin, too; the little cabin where I was born, with its back to the big mountain, and filled with the handiwork of my mother as she had left it when she died. And my father too used to laugh and sing there--he had a clear voice that would roll half-way up the mountain; and as I grew older the miracle at times stirred me with a strange fear, so real to my father did my dead mother seem when he was home. But you look frightened, Miss Standis.h.!.+ Oh, it may seem weird and ghostly now, but it was _true_--so true that I have lain awake nights thinking of it and wis.h.i.+ng that it had never been so!"

"Then you have wished a great sin," said the girl in a voice that seemed scarcely to whisper between her parted lips. "I hope someone will feel toward me--some day--like that."

"But it was this which brought the tragedy, the thing you have asked me to tell you about," he said, unclenching his hands slowly, and then tightening them again until the blood ebbed from their veins. "Interests were coming in; the tentacles of power and greed were reaching out, encroaching steadily a little nearer to our cup at the foot of the mountain. But my father did not dream of what might happen. It came in the spring of the year he took me on my first trip to the States, when I was eighteen. We were gone five months, and they were five months of h.e.l.l for him. Day and night he grieved for my mother and the little home under the mountain. And when at last we came back--"

He turned again to the window, but he did not see the golden sun of the tundra or hear Tautuk calling from the corral.

"When we came back," he repeated in a cold, hard voice, "a construction camp of a hundred men had invaded my father's little paradise. The cabin was gone; a channel had been cut from the waterfall, and this channel ran where my mother's grave had been. They had treated it with that same desecration with which they have destroyed ten thousand Indian graves since then. Her bones were scattered in the sand and mud. And from the moment my father saw what had happened, never another sun rose in the heavens for him. His heart died, yet he went on living--for a time."

Mary Standish had bowed her face in her hands. He saw the tremor of her slim shoulders; and when he came back, and she looked up at him, it was as if he beheld the pallid beauty of one of the white tundra flowers.

"And the man who committed that crime--was John Graham," she said, in the strangely pa.s.sionless voice of one who knew what his answer would be.

"Yes, John Graham. He was there, representing big interests in the States. The foreman had objected to what happened; many of the men had protested; a few of them, who knew my father, had thrown up their work rather than be partners to that crime. But Graham had the legal power; they say he laughed as if he thought it a great joke that a cabin and a grave should be considered obstacles in his way. And he laughed when my father and I went to see him; yes, _laughed_, in that noiseless, oily, inside way of his, as you might think of a snake laughing.

"We found him among the men. My G.o.d, you don't know how I hated him!--Big, loose, powerful, dangling the watch-fob that hung over his vest, and looking at my father in that way as he told him what a fool he was to think a worthless grave should interfere with his work. I wanted to kill him, but my father put a hand on my shoulder, a quiet, steady hand, and said: 'It is my duty, Alan. _My duty_.'

"And then--it happened. My father was older, much older than Graham, but G.o.d put such strength in him that day as I had never seen before, and with his naked hands he would have killed the brute if I had not unlocked them with my own. Before all his men Graham became a ma.s.s of helpless pulp, and from the ground, with the last of the breath that was in him, he cursed my father, and he cursed me. He said that all the days of his life he would follow us, until we paid a thousand times for what we had done. And then my father dragged him as he would have dragged a rat to the edge of a piece of bush, and there he tore his clothes from him until the brute was naked; and in that nakedness he scourged him with whips until his arms were weak, and John Graham was unconscious and like a great hulk of raw beef. When it was over, we went into the mountains."