Mountain made, p.15
Mountain Made, page 15
Rutledge, perspiring, fascinated, hung forward in his chair.
“I shall tell you, then,” said Glanvil, “since your fat brains cannot work it out. The lady will be shocked. Not by your death, but by the base ingratitude that made you stand up before John Glenn, that good man who preserved your life once before . . . made you stand up and assail him, gun in hand. Oh, she will be horrified by the corruption and the evil that she shall find in dear Jack before the end. She shall bless God that she was delivered from the hands of such a man. She shall bless God that she could find such virtues behind a scarred face.”
“You are a devil,” breathed Rutledge.
Glanvil began to laugh softly, gloatingly. “There is the trap exposed to you. Free yourself from it if you can, dear Jack. Sweat and groan and writhe and lash your dull brain into a gallop. Because it might take you to a solution of the mystery, you know.”
“I shall go to her immediately and tell her the whole truth!” said Rutledge, springing up. “I shall tell her that you are Glanvil, and that it was I who scarred your face.”
“When she comes to me for the confirmation, I shall tell her that it is a mad lie. And she will believe me, dear Jack. I shall tell her with sadness and with gravity. Oh, I have ways of making her believe me. I could wish for nothing better. It would entangle you at once and make her despise you. Such a feeble lie, Rutledge. Woman like bold, glaring, giant untruths . . . but, if she hears you say such a thing, she will only be moved to scorn. No, you have committed yourself inevitably. Honesty bids you tell the truth about me, but your love of her forbids. You do love her, dear Jack. Her blue eyes and her bright hair never leave your mind. They are lodged in your soul. Her voice sends quavers of music through your body. You are weak with joy at the mere thought of her. No, dear Jack, you will never risk telling her the truth.”
“You are right,” groaned Rutledge. “I cannot tell her.”
“So you will wait,” said Glanvil, “until I have chosen my time. Then, in the presence of many men, I shall kill you, and make the quarrel seem of your commencement, dear Jack. Oh, yes, I shall shoot in self-defense only. And, in the meantime, while I am waiting for that right time to come, you must remain calm and cool, dear Jack. You must not grow edgy. You must not let your sleep be broken. Always remember that. You must not let the inner man be broken, as it seems to be broken now. For there are shadows under your eyes. Your hands are restless. You cannot sit quiet. Your lips twitch. Your eyes are as uneasy as the eyes of a hunted rabbit. And if you should continue in this way for a little time . . . why, dear Jack, a child of five years could beat you to the draw.”
The whole body of Rutledge lunged forward, but he checked himself. “I have done you one great wrong,” he said, “and for that I am suffering now. But through it all, I meant nothing but honesty, and God fights on the side of honesty. He will help me, Glanvil, and put you down in the end.”
“Wrong, wrong, wrong!” Glanvil laughed. “God favors brains, Rutledge. God has always favored brains in spite of what slaves and cowards say. And when He sees what I am doing now, He will rub his hands with pleasure as I rub mine now, and He will say . . . ‘This is a man indeed. He makes even his misfortune a source of power.’”
“You lie!” groaned Rutledge. “She has told me herself that she cannot look on you without a shudder.”
“Of course,” said Glanvil, his calm unbroken. “She has been talking of very little else than John Glenn. This evening her dear Jack has been filled with her chatter about the new man. She thinks it is horror, but it is really pity, sorrow, wonder. The gates of her mind have been opened. They are standing wide ajar and ready for me to make a great thought enter them. Trust me, dear Jack.”
“I am going,” said Rutledge suddenly.
“She will be hurt if you leave.”
“Curse you, hypocrite.” And he strode from the room.
Glanvil heard him speak tersely to the girl, and then the outer door closed heavily. He himself, of course, went out at once, and in the hall the girl hurried to meet him.
“What is wrong?” she asked. “What has happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, but I saw Jack. He is worked up over something. Something that must have come between the two of you. You must come back with me.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Standing there with one half of her hair in shadow like tarnished gold, and half in light that made it burn softly, she made a picture that Glanvil enjoyed quietly, soberly. Certainly she had become something more than a foolish girl since he had first known her and made love to her.
“Something went wrong,” she was saying. “It was almost . . . as if you two had quarreled. Is that true?”
He shook his head. “Let me put it this way. He and I have disagreed. There has been no quarrel. That’s the end of it.”
“But it can’t be the end,” she insisted. “You who have saved his life. . . .”
He made a little grimace. How sinister a sneer it appeared on his scarred face. “Men forget such things,” he said. “You see, it’s what might be called an obligation, and men hate obligations. If you lend a man five dollars, it’s a pretty sure way of losing his friendship. And with a greater thing, so much the worse. If you lend him his life, he’s nearly sure to hate you.”
“It’s all very strange,” she said, frowning at him. “I know only one thing . . . that you are good and kind, John Glenn, and that Jack Rutledge owes his life to you.”
“Do you know that much?”
“Of course. I suppose that compliments are foolish things, but, when I’ve seen you handle a wild dog as you handle King Silver . . . and when I hear such a story as came up from the village today . . . of how you stepped in between two rascals and their poor victims . . . well, it doesn’t take a great many things like that to help one to a picture of a man. That’s why I wanted you to trust me with the real story of what’s made Jack so excited tonight.”
“He’ll tell you in his own way,” said Glanvil. “And that’s much the best. He’ll have plenty of time to choose his own occasions, because I’ll be getting on in the morning.”
“You mean that you are leaving me?”
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t be happy here?”
He threw out both his hands, palm up. “What does that matter?”
“It matters everything. Tell me, are you sure you could not be happy here?”
“Ah,” said Glanvil, “if I should say what I feel, you would not understand. There is no use talking about it.”
“Do you think so? It makes me sad to hear you talk like this, John Glenn.”
“After all, since I’m going so soon, why shouldn’t I tell you? Well, since I was disfigured by the antler of that stag, I have gone about the world, meeting nothing but hate and scorn, you see. People shuddered when they looked at me. And when I met you today, I waited to see you shrink and turn pale at the sight of me. But you didn’t. You came down all gentleness and kindness, and, that moment, I blessed you with all my soul. Is it true, Miss Carney? Did you feel no horror when you first saw me?”
Even now, as she stood before him, watching his face, she was filled with fear and with distaste, and yet she managed to falter a “no”.
“Ah,” said Glanvil, “what else could I ask for? To find one human being who could look at me without disgust, who could see in me something more than a scarecrow and a ghost . . . that is a happiness that you cannot understand. Happy here? Here is everything that I care most about . . . the free mountains, and the open sky . . . and kindness.”
He felt that in all his life he had never rendered any speech so perfectly, and, although he might have wished to change the words somewhat, yet after all in speech the language is the smallest part and the manner of speaking is all in all. So when he spoke of the free mountains and the open sky, there was a thrill in his voice that made the girl tremble, and, when he lowered his tones to say that one word “kindness”, her eyes filled with tears, as though she saw before her a brilliant picture of this poor man hounded through the world with many brutalities.
“There will be some time,” she said, “when I may know you well enough to tell you a whole story . . . but I can only tell you now, that I have known one man whose face was like the face of an angel, but he was a demon at heart . . . a cold-blooded devil. He taught me that beauty is the smallest thing in the world. It is the heart that counts.”
“Dear Miss Carney,” he said, bowing his head, “I shall keep the thought of you always.”
“You speak as if you were still determined to go at once.”
“In the morning. I must.”
“For fear of Jack Rutledge?”
He threw back his head. “I am not the slightest bit afraid of Rutledge,” he said.
And he could see the perfect belief in her face. No matter what her faith in Jack Rutledge as the man of men, the king of the fighters might have been, it seemed impossible for her to doubt this scarred face, these brilliant and searching brown eyes.
“But,” he added, “you are to marry Rutledge in a few days. That would break everything up, I suppose. Every way you look at this, it’s a great deal better for me to go on.”
“You and Jack Rutledge,” she said, shaking her head with the profundity of her conviction, “have had a falling out over some little matter, I don’t know what. Because high-spirited people are sure to have quarrels. And neither of you will give way. But when both are honest and both are brave, it only needs a little time. This trouble, I’ll wager, is the smallest thing in the world.”
“I can’t talk about it,” he said. “But Rutledge may if he wishes. God knows, there is nothing I wish more than that we should be friends.”
She flushed a little at this, and her eyes shone with a spark of angry enthusiasm.
“Whatever it is, Jack is wrong, and I know he’s wrong. I’ll never let him rest until he’s explained everything. Because I feel that I have a right to interfere here. Why, it makes me heartsick to think that such an old friendship as that between you and Jack Rutledge should be broken up . . . in twenty minutes of quiet talk. It simply must not be.”
“I hope you can do it,” he said simply. “I hope it with all my heart.”
“You’ll stay, then? You won’t go, John Glenn?”
“I am the happiest man in the world,” said the hypocrite.
She followed him to the door.
“When I hear how sad your life has been and when I see the sadness in your face,” she said, “it makes me want to do some great thing to make it all up to you. And we will be friends.”
“With all my heart.”
“That great shadow of a dog . . . where has he gone?”
“King Silver? He smelled a rabbit somewhere. He won’t go far, I think. Good night.”
“I’ll put it all before Jack in the morning, when I see him.”
“I shouldn’t do it, if I were you.”
“Why not?”
“It’s better to let people work out of their own troubles.”
“I know,” she said, “that I can untwist the whole tangle in five minutes. I have a perfect faith in myself.”
“And, after all,” he said, “so have I.”
He left her and went out into the cold blackness of the night. There on the walk he remained for a moment with his head tilted back, drinking in the pure, cold air, and rejoicing in it. He had not dreamed how necessary to him had become the great outdoors during that bitter winter, for now, when he was in a house, he felt crushed and walled in, confined with his whole soul in a narrow compass. So the flare of the firelight died away before his eyes, and they grew accustomed to the stars. The wall of blackness that had at first confronted him gave way, melting back into far prospects of the dim, distant mountains against the sky. So it was always with nature, he felt, a cold and unpleasing and mysterious exterior, and behind that first appearance, wonderful and simple and new beauties for those who stayed to look and to listen.
He was so full of happiness, now, that he could have cried out, he could have shouted and sung. Half the battle had been fought, and it was his victory—it was wholly his victory. When he thought of Jack Rutledge and how that unfortunate would be confronted with a mysterious maze of questions about matters of which poor Jack was in the most perfect ignorance, he had to set his teeth to keep from breaking into loud and joyous laughter. And the more he thought of it, the more he admired his own cleverness. For, upon the merest nothings, he had built up a danger beneath the water that very well might wreck the noble ship of the fortunes of Jack Rutledge.
In the first place, that gentleman would be taken utterly unawares. In the second place, he had not the agility of mind to adapt himself suddenly to such new and to such unknown possibilities. Even if the girl were to sit down and tell Rutledge the plain story of exactly what she had heard and of what she surmised, he would be too dumbfounded to make a rejoinder. But there was no danger that she would do any such thing. She would break out into exclamations. She would begin, perhaps, by asking him to give her one simple favor, and, when he said that he would, she would tell him that he had to be friends with the new man. There was no doubt that the matter would run in this fashion, for she was impulsive. And he, poor fellow, would probably ask her promptly what she was talking about.
So the war would begin.
It was such a delightful structure of nothingnesses that Glanvil felt he had constructed his masterpiece of knavery. He was able to pay himself the greatest compliment that lay within the reach of his mind, for he could say to himself—I am satisfied.
In the meantime, where was the King Silver? He might be in a neighboring field cutting the throats of sheep, by this time, or he might be hunting down the village dogs and slaying them one by one with the savage slashing of his great fangs.
He hurried around the corner of the house, and there he saw the missing animal—there was King Silver like a mighty statue of blackness touched with a gray and glimmering mist, his big body poised and his head high, looking up into the face of a girl—blind Kate Preston.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Perhaps it has been sufficiently seen that Mr. Winsor Glanvil was not an impressionable soul, but he stood for a long moment staring at this picture with something very like cold chills running up and down his spine. He had thought, at first, that the black monster was about to leap again at Kate, as he had done when he first met her. But now there seemed another meaning behind the scene, a meaning that Glanvil utterly refused to give admittance into his mind, at the first. However, he presently saw her put out her hand, and, to his bewilderment, the big animal crouched under it. More and more marvelous, she slipped to one knee, and King Silver stepped closer to her, still crouched a little, but put up his head and seemed to lick her hands.
A sense of weakness spread through the master. He had too recently seen Silver rip open the throat of a great hound; he had too recently seen the monster in fighting action, and this was a new and undreamed of side to his character. It was not Silver that disturbed him the most, however. It was the blind girl.
Once before, when his plans were ripening to perfection and when all the strength of Rutledge could not have defeated him, she had been the moving power that destroyed him. It was her slender hand, after all, that had gouged the scar upon his face. He grew hot with rage at the thought, but a moment later he was cold again. She was not like other women—oh, most unlike them. As she had beaten him once before, would she find a way of beating him once again?
All in the garden, while he stood there, became more visible, and the naked plants and bushes stood out in darker silhouette, for in the east above the mountains there was a dull glow of yellow light, and now the moon was rising. Under that dull light he went to her, and at the soft sound of his steps she rose and faced him.
But King Silver? The blood of the master turned colder still when he saw that the big wolf remained facing the girl and gave him not so much as a glance. He could not help the question. It broke from his lips of its own strength.
“What have you done with the King?”
“He came to meet me,” said the girl. “All at once there was a cold nose in my hand . . . and that was the King Silver. He and I have been talking. All in a moment we were friends.”
He re-sketched the picture that she had drawn so carelessly—that slender girl and that black monster stealing upon her.
“Were you afraid?” he asked.
“I thought it was my last moment on earth. But he seems to have changed his mind about me. He hasn’t moved, has he?”
“He’s still facing you.”
“I thought that I could still feel his eyes on me. I really don’t know what has happened.”
“You have put a charm on him,” answered Glanvil, with a poor attempt at lightness.
“Or he upon me. I don’t know which way it has worked. What made him jump at me the first time, do you know?”
“No. I can’t imagine. But . . . why are you out here in the cold?”
“I’m wrapped warm, you see. And I have a foolish happiness in coming out into the world when I can see almost as much of things as even the best pair of eyes will show.”
“What do you see, then?”
“The stars,” she answered, “and the big mountains across the valley.” She waved to them, and, at the gesture, the wolf reached up his head toward her hand.
“There is a moon coming up. It is barely above Mount Croton now,” said Glanvil.
“Well”—she sighed—“I left that out of the picture. I suppose there is a glint of the Croton River in the heart of the valley, then?”
“A dull streak of white. You can barely guess at it through the shadows . . . much fainter than the sound of it.”
