Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 40
HARRINGTON had watched the demonstration of gratitude to the Salisheuttes get under way, then judged that the moment had come when he could slip off to attend to a private affair of paramount importance. The courthouse being so entirely surrounded, he decided that it would be good strategy to retire into the corridor and across the bridge of sighs to where White or one of the guards could let him out of the front door of the jail. This tactical movement developed perfectly. Not a soul was in sight nearer than some men absorbed in the exploration of debris in basements away off on the other side of Sound Avenue—not a soul, except that as he leaped down the steps Lahleet appeared most casually from under the trees.
"You little life-saver!" he cried, reaching for her with both hands. "What did you run away for?" Then, without waiting for an answer, he demanded eagerly: "Did you see it? . . . Wasn't it great? . . . Worth all the chamber of commerce agony—worth everything!"
"No! Not everything!" objected Lahleet, with a wayward switch of her shoulders. Evidently she was in a contrary mood, perhaps meaning to punish him for forgetting her a while ago; and Harrington noticed that the aboriginal in her was somehow less disguised than he had ever seen it. There was more of the feline in her expression; she was more wilful in manner and there was a smoldering something in her eyes which he had never noticed there before.
"Where are you going in such a hurry?" she demanded impishly, pulling herself free of his grateful handclasp.
But Henry's effervescent happiness was not to be choked up now by any temperamental outburst of his most loyal and serviceable friend. "To tell Billie that I didn't do it—that everybody knows now I didn't do it!" he overflowed, concealing none of his joy in the prospect.
"Huh!" shrugged Lahleet, and wrinkled her short nose. "That won't be any news to her!"
"It won't?" inquired Henry, startled by some pregnancy in the girl's tone. "What do you mean?"
"She knew you didn't do it all the time," Lahleet assured, then smiled as if at his naive simplicity.
"She—she knew?" stammered Harrington, astounded, indignant. Seizing her wrists fiercely, he demanded: "How do you know what she thought?"
Lahleet, accepting the captivity of his hands, gazed up demurely, hers the expression of a woman innocent of anything yet capable of everything—if Henry had had the keenness to interpret it. "I went to see her," the girl confessed without a blush, "that first night you were in jail—to—to tell her they were driving you insane; to plead with her to go your bail, to come to you, write to you, telephone to you, send you a flower even, do anything to—to"
"You—you did that?" murmured the shaken Harrington, surprised—incredulous—grateful, all in one. Then, forgetting everything but that this was his first opportunity to learn something of the state of Billie's mind during those awful days, he pressed on Lahleet what had been his most agonizing question. "But why—why didn't she help me?"
The girl seemed innocently unaware that Harrington was deeply stirred—as innocently unaware as that her first speech had been a mischief-making one or that this next one would complete its work of demolition. "She said she was trying to teach you a lesson," Lahleet intoned carelessly.
"Lesson?" groaned Henry unbelieving, horrified.
"Yes. She thought it would be a good lesson for you to"
"Lesson!" exploded Harrington. "Oh, my God!" Flinging Lahleet's hands from him, he leaned dizzily against the iron hand-rail, while across the screen of his mind there recled the film of all that he had endured. There had come to him the saving hypothesis that Billie actually believed him guilty, that because of that all her faith in him had been shattered; hence she must naturally be indifferent until his vindication came. Until his vindication came! That hypothesis had sweetened all his later sufferings, been the foundation of all of his surviving hopes. "But—but are you sure that she believed that I was—was innocent?" he besought Lahleet, hurt eyes peering.
"Oh, she knew it!" affirmed Lahleet, with satisfied assurance.
Harrington's glance was lowered while he gripped the hand-rail tighter.
The girl's expression was peculiar, relentless. She revealed now that she knew her words had hurt him, that they had been meant to, and the minute his eyes were off her, her own gleamed with savage joy. No ancestor of hers, torturing an enemy at the stake, could have taken keener delight in the pain he inflicted than Lahleet Marceau when she saw Henry Harrington writhing as from a fatal wound. She gazed at his unseeing face quite merciless, with the corners of her lips turned up. Ruthlessly she was killing something—not him but something in him that must hurt him all but mortally when it died.
That it could so hurt him was more nearly true than the single-minded Lahleet could have conceived; for love had been Henry Harrington's whole life for three years now. Why had he chosen all at once to strive and struggle up to where he had become a target? It was for love. What had blinded his eyes till he could so be made the victim of this designing group of men? It was love. Why had it hurt so when they hurled him down? Because he was in love. It was in the love chambers of his heart that he had suffered the agony that had so weakened him. And now he was understanding that he had loved a woman whose heart was calculatingly hard.
"And she knew I was innocent all the while?" he iterated once more, opening and closing his hands helplessly.
"She rather thought the more you suffered the quicker you'd come to your senses," explained Lahleet, hands casually busy with her back hair.
"Senses!" Harrington roared out angrily; and then broke swiftly away—away from the torturing voice which had told him these unpalatable truths, away too from the unpleasant conspicuousness of the place in which he had been standing. With no more design than that he blundered, by the simple accident of walking round the corner, into the one leafy seclusion that the whole outdoors of the town this day afforded. This was Lahleet's erstwhile bench of mourning beneath the tamarack tree, with the angle of two blind walls in front and a screening crescent of cedar shrubs surrounding. Grateful for the solitude, Henry sank down upon the bench, a prey to this final despair.
The girl had followed softly and stood at a little distance watching the lines of realization etch themselves steadily into his lean face—watched savage, relentless, exultant, till at length it seemed to her her hated enemy must have died. Then, like an autopsist trying to determine that the dead are dead, she began merciless verbal stabbings to see if sensation still remained.
"The girl's no good, Henry!" she announced tentatively, then waited. Harrington's bent head did not move, his graven face changed no expression, not so much as a single chiseled line.
"She isn't worth a damn!" the Indian girl experimented more boldly, and again waited. No answer.
"She hasn't got a kick in her—not one!" . . . Silence still.
"She's a doll—not a woman." This with tones of infinite scorn. "She was a business connection only; and now the business is busted. Forget her, Henry—dear!"
Harrington had let these insults to his love fall unchallenged. Perhaps his heart was past sensation.
Lahleet came boldly near now and sat down upon the bench. Harrington was motionless, bowed. The girl studied him critically, clinically almost, and at length the merciless lines about her mouth began to fade. The cold, penetrating light went out of her eyes to be replaced by one that was soft and compassionate. She appeared to see the man now, instead of something inside him, and at the sight all her expressions mellowed and grew tender. She touched his hand softly, experimentally. When it was not drawn away from her she took it fondly between her palms and warmed it, toyed with the fingers of it, petted it; and when presently she felt his figure less immobile, more responsive to her presence, heaved a sigh at last of grateful relief. She saw him too breathe deep at last and straighten. He was coming back to life—back to life . . . with her beside him!
"Henry," she breathed, "oh, Henry, dear!" and drew closer. "You are tired, dear; and no wonder! But you've won," she crowed. "You've whipped 'em all-l-l!" Her smile was wide. "And now what you need is rest—and love! Come away," she wooed softly. "Come away to Lahleet's island and rest. To my island! Wouldn't that be wonderful, Henry?" she coaxed, in soft, purring, arousing tones.
But Harrington's mind, still abstracted, associated only slowly. The thing that waked him like a magic was the mention of her island. Weary, jaded as he was, his imagination kindled at the contrast between these arid ashes and that enchanted speck of which his memory held so entrancing an experience. The island was soft and green and secluded, set like an emerald in a sapphire sea.
And Lahleet's lodge—with its low, down-stuffed couches of furs, with its soothing semi-darkness, with its glow of sun-gold at the cretonne-curtained windows, with its fragrance of herbs, with its broad fireplace in which were smothered simmering broths, roasting grouse and browning biscuit—with the padding footsteps of the little Indian maiden, with her bright face and playful, kittenish, comradely ways to feed him and coddle him and make over his bruised spirit! Why, that lodge on that island appealed to him as the most delectable spot in the world right now.
The picture took hold of him so violently that he rose to his feet in contemplation of its prospect; and Lahleet rose with him. They came up almost as one, with her suddenly clinging so to him that Harrington took quick, startled account of what was happening; he saw her eyes glowing up into his, her lips yearning toward his lips until their wistfulness was pain; and he felt her veins hot against his veins.
"My island, Henry," she panted, "and me!" Then her eyes closed, her chin pressed his breast.
Harrington himself was breathless; his heart stopped while he comprehended slowly. The girl was offering to his hectored spirit a haven that was paradise; but with it she was offering—herself! At last he realized it. Lahleet loved him; she was confessing it—proclaiming it; but even then he thought it had just broken out of her, and the fact seemed to him at once glorious and pitiful. The elemental in her had triumphed over the stoic. With heart of gold, but with coppery drops in the warm tide that visited it, she had suddenly found this new thing in her and scorned to suppress it for one moment. She had flung away the white maiden's coy inhibitions, if ever she had held them, and frankly, with the chaste simplicity of the natura] woman, disclosed to him a preference and a meaning that his eyes had been too blind to see.
As if, having given him time to understand, her eyes that had closed in one passionate sigh upon Henry's breast, opened now with redoubled intensity in their dark beams and a convulsive strength in her grasp that would not be resisted. Harrington swayed to it inevitably. But beside her passionate young strength, the man in him felt also the lure of the woman. Resistance was low; he was frayed, heart-weary, fed-up; and here was this beautiful, colorful little savage hanging about his neck and ingenuously proposing that they who owed each other much should abandon civilization and go off to her island to discharge their mutual debt.
Yet, after a moment, Harrington was, as it were, lifting his head clear of the vapors of passion. Her arms were still about his neck, but over her shoulders he stared at the blank wall. And that was what he saw—a blank wall. It would be so easy to take her—so easy to solace at least a part of him with her, now so plastic in his arms. Her warm, soft little body, her sparkling spirit were temptation—yes!
But didn't he owe her better than to yield—ever so much better? She loved him but would get over it in time. Should he do her so unkind a turn as do that which she would never get over?
And his townsmen? With that new leadership and sense of responsibility which he had just accepted—should he fail them now? . . . because a girl that he loved had failed him?
No! He had decided even as his mind formulated the questions. No! He owed his townsmen better as he owed Lahleet better. He even owed himself better, poor thing as he conceived himself now to be.
Taking the girl by her shoulders, gently, reverently indeed, he lifted her out of his embrace, his head shaking slowly from side to side, his eyes in hers, aglow with tenderness but no beam of responsive love.
The girl saw—she read his answer; there was no need to speak it. And then it was that the stoic came out in her again! Henry saw for a moment pain-filled eyes, pain-constricted lips, one dark moment of wicked resentment instantly conquered, and then, nostrils quivering, the whole dramatized struggle of pride crushing the show of suffering, battling resolutely till it ironed out even the sullen lines of defeat about the mouth.
Harrington had never felt so tenderly for Lahleet, never felt such devotion to her; and yet never dared so little to show any feeling of softness. He perceived that it would not do—it would be unkind.
Her self-control proved the greater, and it was she who spoke first, from some immeasurable sublimated height of renunciation to which she had been lifted by the trueness of her love for him. "Go your way, white man," she said gravely, in a deep throaty voice that was strange to her, "into the high places that are waiting for you. I go mine—back to the blanket!"
"No, no!" protested Henry sharply. "You are not savage. You are a woman—one of the finest, noblest, most inspiring! Everything that woman can be, you can be!"
"But not to you," she answered with a bitter smile.
"To me?" he asked, bitter also. "Who am I?"
Without daring another word, another touch—so they prepared to part: thwarted in love, cemented in friendship. Henry turned the corner, she following at a little distance till he started once more up the stone steps.
"Where are you going, Henry?" she asked, and the casual wonder in her tone was a triumph of self-control.
"Back to jail!" he answered miserably.
Her eyes were on him till the iron door had swallowed him up, and she knew that his had slanted back for one last image of her.