Hidden Creek - Katharine Newlin Burt
"N-no." Sheila's forehead was puckered. Her fingers trembled on the arms
of her chair. "N-no...." Then, with a sort of quaver, she added, "Oh, why
can't we go on like this?--till the snow goes and I can travel with you!"
"Because," he said roughly, "we can't. You take my word for it." After a
pause he went on in his former decisive tone. "I'll be back in two or
three days. I'll fetch the parson."
Sheila sat up straight.
His eyes held hers. "Yes, ma'am. The parson. I'm going to marry
you, Sheila."
She repeated this like a lesson. "You are going to marry me...."
"Yes, ma'am. You'll have three days to think it over. If you don't want
to marry me when the parson comes, why, you can just go back to Rusty
with him." He laughed a little, came over to her, put a hand on each arm
of her chair, and bent down. She shrank back before him. His eyes had the
glitter of a hawk's, and his red and beautiful lips were soft and eager
and--again--a little cruel.
"No," he said, "I won't kiss you till I come back--not even for good-bye.
Then you'll know how I feel about you. You'll know that I believe that
you're a good girl and, Sheila"--here he seemed to melt and falter
before her: he slipped down with one of his graceful Latin movements and
hid his forehead on her knees--"Sheila, my _darling_--that I know you are
fit--oh, so much more than fit--to be the mother of my children ..."
In half an hour, during which they were both profoundly silent, he came
to her again. He was ready for his journey. She was sitting far back in
her chair, her slim legs stretched out. She raised inscrutable eyes
wide to his.
"Good-bye," he said softly. "It's hard to leave you. Good-bye."
She said good-bye even more softly with no change in her look. And he
went out, looking at her over his shoulder till the last second. She
heard the voice of his skis, hissing across the hard crust of the snow.
She sat there stiff and still till the great, wordless silence settled
down again. Then she started up from her chair, ran across to the window,
and saw that he was indeed gone. She came storming back and threw
herself down upon the hide. She cried like a deserted child.
"Oh, Cosme, I'm afraid to be alone! I'm afraid! Why did I let you go?
Come back! Oh, please come back!"
* * * * *
It was late that night when Hilliard reached Rusty, traveling with all
his young strength across the easy, polished surface of the world. He was
dog-tired. He went first to the saloon. Then to the post-office. To his
astonishment he found a letter. It was postmarked New York and he
recognized the small, cramped hand of the family lawyer. He took the
letter up to his bedroom in the Lander Hotel and sat on the bed, turning
the square envelope about in his hands. At last, he opened it.
"MY DEAR COSME [the lawyer had written ... he had known Hilliard as a
child], It is my strong hope that this letter will reach you promptly and
safely at the address you sent me. Your grandfather's death, on the
fifteenth instant, leaves you, as you are no doubt aware, heir to his
fortune, reckoned at about thirty millions. If you will wire on receipt
of this and follow wire in person as soon as convenient, it will greatly
facilitate arrangements. It is extremely important that you should come
at once. Every day makes things more complicated ... in the management
of the estate. I remain, with congratulations,
"Sincerely your friend, ..."
The young man sat there, dazed.
He had always known about those millions; the expectation of them had
always vaguely dazzled his imagination, tampered more than he was aware
with the sincerity of his feelings, with the reality of his life; but now
the shower of gold had fallen all about him and his fancy stretched its
eyes to take in the immediate glitter.
Why, thought Hilliard, this turns life upside down ... I can begin to
live ... I can go East. He saw that the world and its gifts were as truly
his as though he were a fairy prince. A sort of confusion of highly
colored pictures danced through his quick and ignorant brain. The blood
pounded in his ears. He got up and prowled about the little room. It was
oppressively small. He felt caged. The widest prairie would have given
him scant elbow-room. He was planning his trip to the East when the
thought of Sheila first struck him like a cold wave ... or rather it was
as if the wave of his selfish excitement had crashed against the wave of
his desire for her. All was foam and confusion in his spirit. He was
quite incapable of self-sacrifice--a virtue in which his free life and
his temperament had given him little training. It was simply a war of
impulses. His instinct was to give up nothing--to keep hold of every
gift. He wanted, as he had never in his life wanted anything before, to
have his fling. He wanted his birthright of experience. He had cut
himself off from all the gentle ways of his inheritance and lived like a
very Ishmael through no fault of his own. Now, it seemed to him that
before he settled down to the soberness of marriage, he must take one
hasty, heady, compensating draft of life, of the sort of life he might
have had. He would go East, go at once; he would fling himself into a
tumultuous bath of pleasure, and then he would come back to Sheila and
lay a great gift of gold at her feet. He thought over his plans,
reconstructing them. He got pen and ink and wrote a letter to Sheila. He
wrote badly--a schoolboy's inexpressive letter. But he told his story and
his astounding news and drew a vivid enough picture of the havoc it had
wrought in his simplicity. He used a lover's language, but his letter was
as cold and lumpish as a golden ingot. And yet the writer was not cold.
He was throbbing and distraught, confused and overthrown, a boy of
fourteen beside himself at the prospect of a holiday ... It was a stolen
holiday, to be sure, a sort of truancy from manliness, but none the less
intoxicating for that. Cosme's Latin nature was on top; Saxon loyalty and
conscience overthrown. He was an egoist to his finger-tips that night. He
did not sleep a wink, did not even try, but lay on his back across the
bed, hands locked over his hair while "visions of sugar plums danced
through his head." In the morning he went down and made his arrangements
for Sheila, a little less complete, perhaps, than he had intended, for he
met a worthy citizen of Rusty starting up the country with a sled to
visit his traps and to him he gave the letter and confided his
perplexities. It was a hasty interview, for the stage was about to start.
"My wife will sure take your girl and welcome; don't even have to ask
her," the kind-eyed old fellow assured Hilliard. "We'll be glad to have
her for a couple of months. She'll like the kids. It'll be home for her.
Yes, sir"--he patted the excited traveler on the shoulder--"you pile
into the stage and don't you worry any. I'll be up at your place before
night and bring the lady down on my sled. Yes, sir. Pile in and don't
you worry any."
Cosme wrung his hand, avoided his clear eye, and climbed up beside the
driver on the stage. He did not look after the trapper. He stared
ahead beyond the horses to the high white hill against a low and heavy
sky of clouds.
"There's a big snowstorm a comin' down," growled the driver. "Lucky if we
make The Hill to-day. A reg'lar oldtimer it's agoin' to be. And
cold--ugh!"
Cosme hardly heard this speech. The gray world was a golden ball for him
to spin at his will. Midas had touched the snow. The sleigh started with
a jerk and a jingle. In a moment it was running lightly with a crisp,
cutting noise. Cosme's thoughts outran it, leaping toward their gaudy
goal ... a journey out to life and a journey back to love--no wonder his
golden eyes shone and his cheeks flushed.
"You look almighty glad to be going out of here," the driver made
comment.
Hilliard laughed an explosive and excited laugh. "No almighty gladder
than I shall be to be coming back again," he prophesied.
But to prophesy is a mistake. One should leave the future humbly on the
knees of the gods. That night, when Hilliard was lying wakeful in his
berth listening to the click of rails, the old trapper lay under the
driving snow. But he was not wakeful. He slept with no visions of gold or
love, a frozen and untroubled sleep. He had caught his foot in a trap,
and the blizzard had found him there and had taken mercy on his pain.
They did not find his body until spring, and then Cosme's letter to
Sheila lay wet and withered in his pocket.
CHAPTER XIII
LONELINESS
The first misery of loneliness takes the form of a restless inability to
concentrate. It is as if the victim wanted to escape from himself. After
Cosme's departure Sheila prowled about the silent cabin, began this bit
of work and that, dropped it, found herself staring vaguely, listening,
waiting, and nervously shook herself into activity again. She tried to
whistle, but it seemed like somebody else's music and frightened her
ears. At dusk she fastened sacking across the uncurtained windows,
lighted both Cosme's lamps, bringing the second from her bedroom, and
heaped up a dancing and jubilant fire upon the hearth. In the midst of
this illumination she sat, very stiff and still, in the angular
elk-hide-covered chair, and knitted her hands together on her knee. Her
mind was now intensely active; memories, thoughts, plans, fancies racing
fast and furious like screen pictures across her brain. And they seemed
to describe themselves in loud whispers. She had difficulty in keeping
these voices from taking possession of her tongue.
"I don't want to talk to myself," she murmured, and glanced over
her shoulder.
A man has need of his fellows for a shield. Man is man's shelter from
all the storm of unanswered questions. Where am I? What am I? Why am
I?--No reply. No reassuring double to take away the ghost-sense of self,
that unseen, intangible aura of personality in which each of us moves as
in a cloud. In the souls of some there is an ever-present Man God who
will forever save them from this supreme experience. Sheila's religion,
vague, conventional, childish, faltered away from her soul. Except for
her fire, which had a sort of sympathy of life and warmth and motion, she
was unutterably alone. And she was beginning to suffer from the second
misery of solitude--a sense of being many personalities instead of one.
She seemed to be entertaining a little crowd of confused and
argumentative Sheilas. To silence them she fixed her mind on her
immediate problem.
She tried to draw Hilliard close to her heart. She had an honest hunger
for his warm and graceful beauty, for his young strength, but this
natural hunger continually shocked her. She tried not to remember the
smoothness of his neck as her half-conscious hands had slipped away from
it that afternoon when he raised her from the snow. It seemed to her that
her desire for him was centered somewhere in her body. Her mind remained
cool, detached, critical, even hostile. She disliked the manner of his
wooing--not that there should have been any insult to the pride of a
nameless little adventurer, Hudson's barmaid, a waif, in being told that
she was a "good girl" and fit to be the mother of this young man's
children. But Sheila knew instinctively that these things could not be
said, could not even be thought of by such a man as Marcus Arundel. She
remembered his words about her mother.... Sheila wanted with a great
longing to be loved like that, to be so spoken of, so exquisitely
entreated. A phrase in Hudson's letter came to her mind, "I handled you
in my heart like a flower" ... Unconsciously she pressed her hand against
her lips, remembered the taste of whiskey and of blood. If only it had
been Dickie's lips that had first touched her own. Blinding tears fell.
The memory of Dickie's comfort, of Dickie's tremulous restraint, had a
strange poignancy.... Why was he so different from all the rest? So much
more like her father? What was there in this pale little hotel clerk who
drank too much that lifted him out and up into a sort of radiance? Her
memory of Dickie was always white--the whiteness of that moonlight of
their first, of that dawn of their last, meeting. He had had no chance in
his short, unhappy, and restricted life--not half the chance that young
Hilliard's life had given him--to learn such delicate appreciations, such
tenderness, such reserves. Where had he got his delightful, gentle
whimsicalities, that sweet, impersonal detachment that refused to yield
to stupid angers and disgusts? He was like--in Dickie's own fashion she
fumbled for a simile. But there was no word. She thought of a star, that
morning star he had drawn her over to look at from the window of her
sitting-room. Perhaps the artist in Sylvester had expressed itself in
this son he so despised; perhaps Dickie was, after all, Hudson's great
work ... All sorts of meanings and symbols pelted Sheila's brain as she
sat there, exciting and fevering her nerves.
In three days Hilliard would be coming back. His warm youth would
again fill the house, pour itself over her heart. After the silence,
his voice would be terribly persuasive, after the loneliness, his eager,
golden eyes would be terribly compelling! He was going to "fetch the
parson" ... Sheila actually wrung her hands. Only three days for this
decision and, without a decision, that awful, helpless wandering, those
dangers, those rash confidences of hers. "O God, where are you? Why don't
you help me now?" That was Sheila's prayer. It gave her little comfort,
but she did fall asleep from the mental exhaustion to which it brought at
least the relief of expression.
When she woke, she found the world a horrible confusion of storm. It
could hardly be called morning--a heavy, flying darkness of drift, a wind
filled with icy edges that stung the face and cut the eyes, a wind with
the voice of a driven saw. The little cabin was caught in the whirling
heart of a snow spout twenty feet high. The firs bent and groaned. There
is a storm-fear, one of the inherited instinctive fears. Sheila's little
face looked out of the whipped windows with a pinched and shrinking
stare. She went from window to hearth, looking and listening, all day. A
drift was blown in under the door and hardly melted for all the blazing
fire. That night she couldn't go to bed. She wrapped herself in blankets
and curled herself up in the chair, nodding and starting in the circle of
the firelight.
For three terrible days the world was lost in snow. Before the end of
that time Sheila was talking to herself and glad of the sound of her own
hurried little voice. Then, like God, came a beautiful stillness and the
sun. She opened the door on the fourth morning and saw, above the fresh,
soft, ascending dazzle of the drift, a sky that laughed in azure, the
green, snow-laden firs, a white and purple peak. She spread out her hands
to feel the sun and found it warm. She held it like a friendly hand. She
forced herself that day to shovel, to sweep, even to eat. Perhaps Cosme
would be back before night. He and the parson would have waited for the
storm to be over before they made their start. She believed in her own
excuses for five uneasy days, and then she believed in the worst of all
her fears. She had a hundred to choose from--Cosme's desertion, Cosme's
death.... One day she spent walking to and fro with her nails driven into
her palms.
* * * * *
Late that night the white world dipped into the still influence of a full
white moon. Before Hilliard's cabin the great firs caught the light with
a deepening flush of green, their shadows fell in even lavender tracery
delicate and soft across the snow, across the drifted roof. The smoke
from the half-buried chimney turned to a moving silver plume across the
blue of the winter night sky--intense and warm as though it reflected an
August lake.
The door of the cabin opened with a sharp thrust and Sheila stepped
out. She walked quickly through the firs and stood on the edge of the
open range-land, beyond and below which began the dark ridge of the
primeval woods. She stood perfectly still and lifted her face to the
sky. For all the blaze of the moon the greater stars danced in
radiance. Their constellations sloped nobly across her dazzled vision.
She had come very close to madness, and now her brain was dumb and
dark as though it had been shut into a blank-walled cell. She stood
with her hands hanging. She had no will nor wish to pray. The knowledge
had come to her that if she went out and looked this winter Pan in the
face, her brain would snap, either to life or death. It would burst its
prison ... She stared, wide-eyed, dry-eyed, through the immense cold
height of air up at the stars.
All at once a door flew open in her soul and she knew God ... no visible
presence and yet an enveloping reality, the God of the savage earth, of
the immense sky, of the stars, the God unsullied and untempted by man's
worship, no God that she had ever known, had ever dreamed of, had ever
prayed to before. She did not pray to Him now. She let her soul stand
open till it was filled as were the stars and the earth with light....
The next day Sheila found her voice and sang at her work. She gave
herself an overwhelming task of cleaning and scrubbing. She was on her
knees like a charwoman, sniffing the strong reek of suds, when there came
a knocking at her door. She leapt up with pounding heart. But the
knocking was more like a scraping and it was followed by a low whine. For
a second Sheila's head filled with a fog of terror and then came a homely
little begging bark, just the throaty, snuffling sob of a homeless puppy.
Sheila took Cosme's six-shooter, saw that it was loaded, and, standing in
the shelter of the door, she slowly opened it. A few moments later the
gun lay a yard away on the soapy, steaming floor and Berg was held tight
in her arms. His ecstasy of greeting was no greater than her ecstasy of
welcome. She cried and laughed and hugged and kissed him. That night,
after a mighty supper, he slept on her bed across her feet. Two or three
times she woke and reached her hand down to caress his rough thick coat.
The warmth of his body mounted from her feet to her heart. She thought
that he had been sent to her by that new God. As for Berg, he had found
his God again, the taming touch of a small human hand.
* * * * *
It was in May, one morning in May--she had long ago lost count of her
days--when Sheila stepped across her sill and saw the ground. Just a
patch it was, no bigger than a tablecloth, but it made her catch her
breath. She knelt down and ran her hands across it, sifted some gravel
through her fingers. How strange and various and colorful were the atoms
of stone, rare as jewels to her eyes so long used to the white and violet
monotony of snow. Beyond the gravel, at the very edge of the drift, a
slender crescent of green startled her eyes and--yes--there were a dozen
valorous little golden flowers, as flat and round as fairy doubloons.
Attracted by her cry, Berg came out, threw up his nose, and snuffed.
Spring spoke loudly to his nostrils. There was sap, rabbits were
about--all of it no news to him. Sheila sat down on the sill and hugged
him close. The sun was warm on his back, on her hands, on the boards
beneath her.
"May--May--May--" she whispered, and up in the firs quite suddenly, as
though he had thrown reserve to the four winds, a bluebird repeated her
"May--May--May" on three notes, high, low, and high again, a little
musical stumble of delight. It had begun again--that whistling-away of
winter fear and winter hopelessness.
The birds sang and built and the May flies crept up through the snow and
spun silver in the air for a brief dazzle of life.
The sun was so warm that Berg and Sheila dozed on their doorsill. They
did little else, these days, but dream and doze and wait.
The snow melted from underneath, sinking with audible groans of
collapse and running off across the frozen ground to swell Hidden
Creek. The river roared into a yellow flood, tripped its trees, sliced
at its banks. Sheila snowshoed down twice a day to look at it. It was a
sufficient barrier, she thought, between her and the world. And now,
she had attained to the savage joy of loneliness. She dreaded change.
Above all she dreaded Hilliard. That warmth of his beauty had faded
utterly from her senses. It seemed as faint as a fresco on a
long-buried wall. Intrusion must bring anxiety and pain, it might bring
fear. She had had long communion with her stars and the God whose name
they signaled. She, with her dog friend under her hand, had come to
something very like content.
The roar of Hidden Creek swelled and swelled. After the snow had shrunk
into patches here and there under the pines and against hilly slopes,
there was still the melting of the mountain glaciers.
"Nobody can possibly cross!" Sheila exulted. "A man would have to risk
his life." And it was in one of those very moments of her savage
self-congratulation when there came the sound of nearing hoofs.
She was sitting on her threshold, watching the slow darkness, a
sifting-down of ashes through the still air. It was so very still that
the little new moon hung there above the firs like faint music. Silver
and gray, and silver and green, and violet--Sheila named the delicacies
of dappled light. The stars had begun to shake little shivers of radiance
through the firs. They were softer than the winter stars--their keenness
melted by the warm blue of the air. Sheila sat and held her knees and
smiled. The distant, increasing tumult of the river, so part of the
silence that it seemed no sound at all, lulled her--Then--above it--the
beat of horse's hoofs.
At first she just sat empty of sensation except for the shock of those
faint thuds of sound. Then her heart began to beat to bursting; with
dread, with a suffocation of suspense. She got up, quiet as a thief. The
horse stopped. There came a step, rapid and eager. She fled like a
furtive shadow into the house, fell on her knees there by the hearth, and
hid her face against the big hide-covered chair. Her eyes were full of
cold tears. Her finger-tips were ice. She was shaking--shuddering,
rather--from head to foot. The steps had come close, had struck the
threshold. There they stopped. After a pause, which her pulses filled
with shaken rhythm, her name was spoken--So long it had been since she
had heard it that it fell on her ear like a foreign speech.
"Sheila! Sheila!"
She lifted her head sharply. It was not Hilliard's voice.
"Sheila--" There was such an agony of fear in the softly spoken
syllables, there was such a weight of dread on the breath of the speaker,
that, for very pity, Sheila forgot herself. She got up from the floor and
moved dazedly to meet the figure on the threshold. It was dimly outlined
against the violet evening light. Sheila came up quite close and put her
hands on the tense, hanging arms. They caught her. Then she sobbed and
laughed aloud, calling out in her astonishment again and again, softly,
incredulously--
"_You_, Dickie? Oh, Dickie, Dickie, it's--_you_?"
CHAPTER XIV
SHEILA AND THE STARS
Hilliard's first messenger had been hindered by death. Several times it
seemed that his second messenger would suffer the same grim prevention.
But this second messenger was young and set like steel to his purpose. He
left the railroad at Millings, hired a horse, crossed the great plain
above the town and braved the Pass, dangerous with overbalanced weights
of melting snow. There, on the lonely Hill, he had his first encounter
with that Arch-Hinderer. A snow-slide caught him and he left his horse
buried, struggling out himself from the cold smother like a maimed insect
to lie for hours by the road till breath and life came back to him. He
got himself on foot to the nearest ranch, and there he hired a fresh
horse and reached Rusty, at the end of the third day.
Rusty was overshadowed by a tragedy. The body of the trapper, Hilliard's
first messenger, had been found under the melting snow, a few days
before, and to the white-faced young stranger was given that stained and
withered letter in which Hilliard had excused and explained his
desertion.
Nothing, at Rusty, had been heard of Sheila. No one knew even that she
had ever left Miss Blake's ranch--the history of such lonely places is a
sealed book from snowfall until spring. Their tragedies are as dumb as
the tragedies of animal life. No one had ever connected Sheila's name
with Hilliard's. No one knew of his plans for her. The trapper had set
off without delay, not even going back to his house, some little distance
outside of Rusty, to tell his wife that he would be bringing home a
lodger with him. There was, to be sure, at the office a small bundle of
letters all in the same hand addressed to Miss Arundel. They had to wait,
perforce, till the snow-bound country was released.