The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 23

Spurrier remembered how she had declared she would almost rather see him die than surrender him to another girl.

Then out of the face the pa.s.sion faded and the deep eyes widened to a suffering like that of despair. The sweetly curved lips drooped in an ineffable wistfulness and the smooth throat worked spasmodically, while the hands went up and covered the face.

Spurrier drew back into the room into which Glory could not see, and then in warning of his coming spoke aloud in a matter-of-fact voice.

"I've found it," he declared. "It was hiding out from me--that watch."

When, after that preface, he came back, Glory was standing again in the doorway and as she turned, she presented a face from which had been banished the storm of her recent agitation.

He handed her the watch which she took with a steady hand, and a brief but cheery, "Farewell."

As she started away Spurrier braced himself with a strong effort and inquired: "Glory, didn't you have any question to ask me--about the girl--in the frame?"

She halted in the path and stood looking down. Her lowered lids hid her eyes, but he thought her cheeks paled a shade. Then she shook her head.

"Not unless it's something--you want to tell--without my asking," she announced steadfastly.

For over a week he had struggled to bring himself to his confession and had failed. Now a sudden impulse a.s.sured him that it would never be easier; that every delay would make it harder and blacken him with a heavier seeming of treason. Vivien's portrait served as a fortuitous cue, and he must avail himself of it.

This was the logical time and place, when silence would be only an unuttered lie and when procrastination would strip him of even his residue of self-respect. To wait for an easy occasion was to hope for the impossible and to act with as craven a spirit as to falter when the bugle sounded a charge.

Yet he remained so long silent that Glory, looking up and reading the hard-wrung misery on his face and the stiff movement of the lips that made nothing of their efforts, knew, in advance, the tenor of the unspoken message.

She closed her eyes as if to shut out some sudden glare too painful to be borne, and then in a quietly courageous voice she helped him out.

"You _do_ want to tell me, Jack. You want to take back--what you said--over there--don't you?"

Spurrier moistened his lips, with his tongue. "G.o.d knows," he burst out vehemently, "I don't want to take back one syllable of what I said--about loving you."

"What is it, then?"

"Come inside, please," he pleaded. "I'll try to explain."

He went stumblingly ahead of her and set a chair beside the table and then he leaned toward her and sought for words.

"I love you, Glory," he fervently declared. "I love you as I didn't suppose I could love any one. To me you are music and starlight--but I guess I'm almost engaged to her." He jerked his head rebelliously toward the portrait.

Glory was numb except for a dull, very present ache that started in her heart and filled her to her finger tips, and she made no answer.

"Her father," Spurrier forced himself on, "is a great financier. I'm his man. I'm a little cog in a big machine. It's been practically understood that I was to become his son-in-law--his successor. I'm too deep in, to pull out. It's like a soldier in the thick of a campaign.

I've got to go through."

That seemed an easier and kinder thing to say than that she herself was not qualified for full admittance into the world of his larger life.

"You knew this--the other day--as well as now," she reminded him, speaking in a stunned voice, yet without anger.

"So help me G.o.d, Glory--I had forgotten--everything but--you."

"And now," she half whispered in a dulled monotone, "you remember all the rest."

She sat there with the basket on the puncheon floor at her feet, and her fingers twisted themselves tautly together. Her lips, parted and drooping, gave her delicate face a stamp of dumb suffering, and Spurrier's arms ached to go comfortingly around her, but he held himself rigid while the silence lengthened. The old clock on the mantel ticked clamorously and outside the calls of the bobwhites seemed to grow louder and nearer until, half-consciously, Spurrier noted their insistence.

Then faintly, Glory said: "You didn't make me any promise. If you had--I'd give it back to you."

She rose unsteadily and stood gathering her strength, and Spurrier, struggling against the impulse which a.s.sailed him like a madness to throw down the whole structure of his past and designed future and sweep her into his arms, stood with a metal-like rigidity of posture.

Whatever his ultimate decision might be, he kept telling himself, no decision reached by surrender to such tidal emotion at a moment of equinox could be trusted. Glory herself would not trust it long.

So while the room remained voiceless and the minds of the man and the girl were rocking in the swirl of their feelings, the physical senses themselves seemed, instead of inert, preternaturally keen--and something came to Spurrier's ears which forced its way to his attention through the barrier of his abstraction.

Never had the calls of the quail been so frequent and incessant before, but this sound was different, as though some one in the nearby tangle had stumbled and in the effort to catch himself had caught and shaken the leaf.a.ge.

So the man went to the door and stood looking out.

For a moment he remained there framed and exposed as if painted upon a target, and--so close that they seemed to come together--two rifles spoke, and two bullets came whining into the house. One imbedded itself with a soggy thud in the squared logs of the rear wall but one, more viciously directed by the chances of its course, struck full in the center of the gla.s.s that covered the pictured face of Vivien Harrison and sent the portrait clattering and shattered to the floor.

In an instant Spurrier had leaped back, once more miraculously saved, and slammed the door, but while he was dropping the stanch bar into its sockets, a crash of gla.s.s and fresh roars from another direction told him that he was also being fired upon through the window. That meant that the house was surrounded.

"Who are they, Jack?" gasped the girl, shocked by that unwarned fusillade into momentary forgetfulness of everything, except that her lover was beset by enemies, and the man who was reaching for his rifle, and whose eyes had hardened into points of flint, shook his head.

"Whoever they are," he answered, "they want me--only me--but it would be death for you to go out through the door."

He drew her to a shadowed corner out of line with both door and window, and seized her pa.s.sionately in his arms.

"If we--can't have each other----" he declared tensely, "I don't want life. You said you'd almost rather see me killed than lose me to another woman. Now, listen!"

Holding her close to his breast, he drew a deep breath and his narrowed eyes softened into something like contentment.

"If you tried to go out first, you'd die before they recognized you.

They think I'm alone here and they'll shoot at the first movement. But if _I_ go out first and fight as long as I can then they'll be satisfied and the way will be clear for you."

She threw back her head and her hysterical laugh was scornful.

"Clear for me after _you're_ dead!" she exclaimed. "Hev ye got two guns? We'll both go out alive or else neither one of us."

Then suddenly she drew away from him, and he saw her hurriedly scribbling on a sc.r.a.p of paper. Outside it was quiet again.

Glory folded the small sheet and took the pigeon from its basket and then, for the first time, Spurrier, who had forgotten the bird, divined her intent.

He was busying himself with laying out cartridges, and preparing for a siege, and when he looked up again she stood with the bird against her cheek, just as she had held the dead quail on that first day.

But before he could interfere she had drawn near the window and he saw that to reach the broken pane and liberate the pigeon she must, for a moment, stand exposed.

He leaped for her with a shout of warning, but she had straightened and thrust the bird out, and then to the accompaniment of a horrible uproar of musketry that drowned his own outcry he saw her fall back.

Spurrier was instantly on his knees lifting the drooping head, and as her lids flickered down she whispered with a pallid smile:

"The bird's free. He'll carry word home--if ye kin jest hold 'em back fer a spell and----"