In those ten days all the wonders
of June came up out of the south. Life pulsed
with a new and vibrant force. The crimson fire-flowers,
first of wild blooms to come after snow and frost,
splashed the green spaces with red. The forests
took on new colors, the blue of the sky grew nearer,
and in men’s veins the blood ran with new vigor
and anticipations. To Keith they were all this
and more. Four years along the rim of the Arctic
had made it possible for him to drink to the full
the glory of early summer along the Saskatchewan.
And to Mary Josephine it was all new. Never had
she seen a summer like this that was dawning, that
most wonderful of all the summers in the world, which
comes in June along the southern edge of the Northland.
Keith had played his promised part.
It was not difficult for him to wipe away the worst
of McDowell’s suspicions regarding Miss Kirkstone,
for McDowell was eager to believe. When Keith
told him that Miriam was on the verge of a nervous
breakdown simply because of certain trouble into which
Shan Tung had inveigled her brother, and that everything
would be straightened out the moment Shan Tung returned
from Winnipeg, the iron man seized his hands in a
sudden burst of relief and gratitude.
“But why didn’t she confide
in me, Conniston?” he complained. “Why
didn’t she confide in me?” The anxiety
in his voice, its note of disappointment, were almost
boyish.
Keith was prepared. “Because-”
He hesitated, as if projecting the
thing in his mind. “McDowell, I’m
in a delicate position. You must understand without
forcing me to say too much. You are the last
man in the world Miss Kirkstone wants to know about
her trouble until she has triumphed, and it is over.
Delicacy, perhaps; a woman’s desire to keep
something she is ashamed of from the one man she looks
up to above all other men-to keep it away
from him until she has cleared herself so that there
is no suspicion. McDowell, if I were you, I’d
be proud of her for that.”
McDowell turned away, and for a space
Keith saw the muscles in the back of his neck twitching.
“Derwent, maybe you’ve
guessed, maybe you understand,” he said after
a moment with his face still turned to the window.
“Of course she will never know. I’m
too Old, old enough to be her father. But I’ve
got the right to watch over her, and if any man ever
injures her-”
His fists grew knotted, and softly Keith said behind
him:
“You’d possibly do what
John Keith did to the man who wronged his father.
And because the Law is not always omniscient, it is
also possible that Shan Tung may have to answer in
some such way. Until then, until she comes to
you of her own free will and with gladness in her
eyes tells you her own secret and why she kept it from
you-until she does that, I say, it is your
part to treat her as if you had seen nothing, guessed
nothing, suspected nothing. Do that, McDowell,
and leave the rest to me.”
He went out, leaving the iron man
still with his face to the window.
With Mary Josephine there was no subterfuge.
His mind was still centered in his own happiness.
He could not wipe out of his brain the conviction
that if he waited for Shan Tung he was waiting just
so long under the sword of Damocles, with a hair between
him and doom. He hoped that Miriam Kirkstone’s
refusal to confide in him and her reluctance to furnish
him with the smallest facts in the matter would turn
Mary Josephine’s sympathy into a feeling of
indifference if not of actual resentment. He
was disappointed. Mary Josephine insisted on having
Miss Kirkstone over for dinner the next day, and from
that hour something grew between the two girls which
Keith knew he was powerless to overcome. Thereafter
he bowed his head to fate. He must wait for Shan
Tung.
“If it wasn’t for your
promise not to fall in love, I’d be afraid,”
Mary Josephine confided to him that night, perched
on the arm of his big chair. “At times
I was afraid today, Derry. She’s lovely.
And you like pretty hair-and hers-is
wonderful!”
“I don’t remember,”
said Keith quietly, “that I promised you I wouldn’t
fall in love. I’m desperately in love, and
with you, Mary Josephine. And as for Miss Kirkstone’s
lovely hair-I wouldn’t trade one of
yours for all she has on her head.”
At that, with a riotous little laugh
of joy, Mary Josephine swiftly unbound her hair and
let it smother about his face and shoulders.
“Sometimes I have a terribly funny thought, Derry,”
she whispered. “If we hadn’t always
been sweethearts, back there at home, and if you hadn’t
always liked my hair, and kissed me, and told me I
was pretty, I’d almost think you weren’t
my brother!”
Keith laughed and was glad that her
hair covered his face. During those wonderful
first days of the summer they were inseparable, except
when matters of business took Keith away. During
these times he prepared for eventualities. The
Keith properties in Prince Albert, he estimated, were
worth at least a hundred thousand dollars, and he learned
from McDowell that they would soon go through a process
of law before being turned over to his fortunate inheritors.
Before that time, however, he knew that his own fate
would be sealed one way or the other, and now that
he had Mary Josephine to look after, he made a will,
leaving everything to her, and signing himself John
Keith. This will he carried in an envelope pinned
inside his shirt. As Derwent Conniston he collected
one thousand two hundred and sixty dollars for three
and a half years back wage in the Service. Two
hundred and sixty of this he kept in his own pocket.
The remaining thousand he counted out in new hundred-dollar
bills under Mary Josephine’s eyes, sealed the
bills in another envelope, and gave the envelope to
her.
“It’s safer with you than
with me,” he excused himself. “Fasten
it inside your dress. It’s our grub-stake
into the mountains.”
Mary Josephine accepted the treasure
with the repressed delight of one upon whose fair
shoulders had been placed a tremendous responsibility.
There were days of both joy and pain
for Keith. For even in the fullest hours of his
happiness there was a thing eating at his heart, a
thing that was eating deeper and deeper until at times
it was like a destroying flame within him. One
night he dreamed; he dreamed that Conniston came to
his bedside and wakened him, and that after wakening
him he taunted him in ghoulish glee and told him that
in bequeathing him a sister he had given unto him
forever and forever the curse of the daughters of
Achelous. And Keith, waking in the dark hour of
night, knew in his despair that it was so. For
all time, even though he won this fight he was fighting,
Mary Josephine would be the unattainable. A sister-and
he loved her with the love of a man!
It was the next day after the dream
that they wandered again into the grove that sheltered
Keith’s old home, and again they entered it and
went through the cold and empty rooms. In one
of these rooms he sought among the titles of dusty
rows of books until he came to one and opened it.
And there he found what had been in the corner of his
mind when the sun rose to give him courage after the
night of his dream. The daughters of Achelous
had lost in the end. Ulysses had tricked them.
Ulysses had won. And in this day and age it was
up to him, John Keith, to win, and win he would!
Always he felt this mastering certainty
of the future when alone with Mary Josephine in the
open day. With her at his side, her hand in his,
and his arm about her waist, he told himself that all
life was a lie-that there was no earth,
no sun, no song or gladness in all the world, if that
world held no hope for him. It was there.
It was beyond the rim of forest. It was beyond
the yellow plains, beyond the farthest timber of the
farthest prairie, beyond the foothills; in the heart
of the mountains was its abiding place. As he
had dreamed of those mountains in boyhood and youth,
so now he dreamed his dreams over again with Mary
Josephine. For her he painted his pictures of
them, as they wandered mile after mile up the shore
of the Saskatchewan-the little world they
would make all for themselves, how they would live,
what they would do, the mysteries they would seek
out, the triumphs they would achieve, the glory of
that world-just for two. And Mary
Josephine planned and dreamed with him.
In a week they lived what might have
been encompassed in a year. So it seemed to Keith,
who had known her only so long. With Mary Josephine
the view-point was different. There had been a
long separation, a separation filled with a heartbreak
which she would never forget, but it had not served
to weaken the bonds between her and this loved one,
who, she thought, had always been her own. To
her their comradeship was more complete now than it
ever had been, even back in the old days, for they
were alone in a land that was strange to her, and one
was all that the world held for the other. So
her possessorship of Keith was a thing which-again
in the dark and brooding hours of night-sometimes
made him writhe in an agony of shame. Hers was
a shameless love, a love which had not even the lover’s
reason for embarrassment, a love unreserved and open
as the day. It was her trick, nights, to nestle
herself in the big armchair with him, and it was her
fun to smother his face in her hair and tumble it
about him, piling it over his mouth and nose until
she made him plead for air. Again she would fit
herself comfortably in the hollow of his arm and sit
the evening out with her head on his shoulder, while
they planned their future, and twice in that week
she fell asleep there. Each morning she greeted
him with a kiss, and each night she came to him to
be kissed, and when it was her pleasure she kissed
him-or made him kiss her-when
they were on their long walks. It was bitter-sweet
to Keith, and more frequently came the hours of crushing
desolation for him, those hours in the still, dark
night when his hypocrisy and his crime stood out stark
and hideous in his troubled brain.
As this thing grew in him, a black
and foreboding thunderstorm on the horizon of his
dreams, an impulse which he did not resist dragged
him more and more frequently down to the old home,
and Mary Josephine was always with him. They
let no one know of these visits. And they talked
about John Keith, and in Mary Josephine’s eyes
he saw more than once a soft and starry glow of understanding.
She loved the memory of this man because he, her brother,
had loved him. And after these hours came the
nights when truth, smiling at him, flung aside its
mask and stood a grinning specter, and he measured
to the depths the falseness of his triumph. His
comfort was the thought that she knew. Whatever
happened, she would know what John Keith had been.
For he, John Keith, had told her. So much of
the truth had he lived.
He fought against the new strain that
was descending upon him slowly and steadily as the
days passed. He could not but see the new light
that had grown in Miriam Kirkstone’s eyes.
At times it was more than a dawn of hope. It
was almost certainty. She had faith in him, faith
in his promise to her, in his power to fight, his
strength to win. Her growing friendship with
Mary Josephine accentuated this, inspiring her at
times almost to a point of conviction, for Mary Josephine’s
confidence in him was a passion. Even McDowell,
primarily a fighter of his own battles, cautious and
suspicious, had faith in him while he waited for Shan
Tung. It was this blind belief in him that depressed
him more than all else, for he knew that victory for
himself must be based more or less on deceit and treachery.
For the first time he heard Miriam laugh with Mary
Josephine; he saw the gold and the brown head together
out in the sun; he saw her face shining with a light
that he had never seen there before, and then, when
he came upon them, their faces were turned to him,
and his heart bled even as he smiled and held out
his hands to Mary Josephine. They trusted him,
and he was a liar, a hypocrite, a Pharisee.
On the ninth day he had finished supper
with Mary Josephine when the telephone rang.
He rose to answer it. It was Miriam Kirkstone.
“He has returned,” she said.
That was all. The words were
in a choking voice. He answered and hung up the
receiver. He knew a change had come into his face
when he turned to Mary Josephine. He steeled
himself to a composure that drew a questioning tenseness
into her face. Gently he stroked her soft hair,
explaining that Shan Tung had returned and that he
was going to see him. In his bedroom he strapped
his Service automatic under his coat.
At the door, ready to go, he paused.
Mary Josephine came to him and put her hands to his
shoulders. A strange unrest was in her eyes, a
question which she did not ask.
Something whispered to him that it
was the last time. Whatever happened now, tonight
must leave him clean. His arms went around her,
he drew her close against his breast, and for a space
he held her there, looking into her eyes.
“You love me?” he asked softly.
“More than anything else in the world,”
she whispered.
“Kiss me, Mary Josephine.”
Her lips pressed to his.
He released her from his arms, slowly, lingeringly.
After that she stood in the lighted
doorway, watching him, until he disappeared in the
gloom of the slope. She called good-by, and he
answered her. The door closed.
And he went down into the valley,
a hand of foreboding gripping at his heart.