MRS. SIMMONS sat through the meal, white faced and silent. Her eyes followed her husband’s nervous movements, but she did not seem to be listening to his incessant talk. He was trying to talk away the disagreeable thing between them, and apparently she had not the strength to join him in the effort. She saw him across the table, strangely apart from her,—not the lover and husband who had been woven into her life. He was a large, tall man, with clear black eyes, a resounding laugh, and vehement, expressive movements. Compared with Dr. Vessinger he had almost a foreign intensity and emotionality about him, which it occurred to her suddenly had become more prominent during the years of their marriage, just as his chest had broadened, his arms and hands had become thicker, his whole person had grown mature.
She recalled him as he was when she had first seen him, in Colorado Springs, eight years before, tall, large-boned, awkward. He had gained from civilization. The power that she had felt then in the rough, she had tested in the common manner of marriage and had never found it wanting—until now!
Now, from this fear which beset her, this trouble growing from them both in the person and soul of the child, she could feel no help in him. He was turning away his gaze and chattering, believing only in gross physical ills, such as sickness and sudden death, loss of money and accident,—calamities which one might name to one’s neighbors, discuss with one’s doctor, and bemoan quite aloud. But for this which was unnamable, the fear of destiny, he had no courage: he refused to see! She must grope her way to the understanding of the riddle; she must begin, alone, the struggle with the future....
The maid poured Simmons a second glass of whiskey and water, and handed him a box of cigars. He leaned back in his chair, stretching forward his feet in physical comfort, emphasized by the roar of the summer tempest, which had finally broken in full fury outside. Forked streaks of light illumined the pallid curtains; furious bursts of rain hit sharply the casement windows, as with the thongs of whips. Lull and sullen quiet; then the fury of the tempest—thus it repeated itself.
Mrs. Simmons left the room, noiselessly crossing the hall and mounting the stairs. By the time her husband finished his cigar she had returned, with the same stealthy, restless step, the same questioning eyes.
“He is lying so quietly, Olaf,” she said. “His arm is doubled under his head, and his little fingers are open. His lips tremble with his breath. He is my angel again! I cannot believe anything else. Why should my child be that demon?”
Her husband put his arm about her affectionately and led her into the drawing-room.
“There! You are coming to look at it sensibly, Evelyn,” he said encouragingly.
She drew away from his caress.
“No, no! I know what is there. I had rather see him dead in his bed there to-night than to see that fire in his eyes grow and burn and kill him!”
Suddenly she burst into tears.
“To fear it always. To think of it day and night. To know that it will come back and seize him some hour when I am not there to help him! O God, why did it come to me? What have I done?”
She wept miserably, but when he tried to comfort her she held herself aloof. In their misery they were apart, God dealing with each one in his sorrow separately.
“Come, Evelyn!” the husband broke out. “Enough of this! To-morrow we’ll have in a doctor, the best you can find in the city. Maybe he’ll just give him a dose of something and jog his liver.”
But his wife, who had been standing beside the window, her forehead pressed against the cold pane, whirled about and faced him.
“Did you—ever think—that—you were old Oscar’s son?”
“What put that into your head? I told you all I knew—the story old Oscar told me. The whole camp had it the same way.”
“That he found you in the frozen cabin of those Vermonters up among the Rockies? Your father and mother had died from cold and hunger, and he found you just in time?”
He hesitated a moment; and then he added honestly:
“It must have been so; but I have never found a man who knew anything about the cabin, or those Vermonters. Well, it made no difference—so long as you took me.”
“No, it made no matter to me. I said so then when you asked me to marry you.” She waited a moment before adding, “And I say so now. Nothing can make it any different!”
“Bless you for that!”
But she quickly parted from his kiss.
“Tell me about old Oscar. He was rough and bad at times, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, rough,—not bad—a fierce customer, a regular Berserker, when he was taken that way,—when he was drunk or in a bad humor. But I don’t want to think of that—he was so good to me, brought me up, gave me my education, taught me my profession himself, and put me in the way of having a happy life. It isn’t right to remember his bad side.”
“What do you mean? You never told me he was bad. I thought you meant he was rough and uneducated—that he made his way without a cent from the time he landed in New York. What else do you mean? Was he a bad man? Was he wicked?”
The man walked to and fro, disturbed and puzzled. He had stumbled on the worst idea in the world for his wife to feed her imagination upon, and yet he knew that she was aroused—he could not put her off with excuses. He had never told her of his old barbarian benefactor’s darker side, partly because he did not like to mention rude vices to her and partly because it seemed disloyal to his kindest friend. And he was not skilful in handling the truth. What he had to say, he was forced to blurt out plainly.
“Why, it wasn’t drawing-room life in a Colorado camp in those days, anyway, and the older crowd were a pretty rough lot, all of them. Oscar Svenson was better than most, generally. But he would have his times of being drunk and disorderly, and he was such a big fellow and so strong that when he got violent the camp generally knew it. I can remember once when I was a little fellow sitting in the corner of the saloon when he had one of his fits. He was a giant, a head taller than I am, with a great mane of hair all over his head, growing down the nape of his neck in a thick mat under his shirt.”
Mrs. Simmons started, and twisted her hands nervously. But she controlled herself.
“Go on!”
“When he was drunk, he didn’t shoot—that wasn’t his way. He would use his knife, or take up a man in his arms and crush him like a bear with his two hands. That day—but, pshaw! It’s all nonsense, my sitting here and telling you fool stories to make you creepy. The rain has stopped. I’ll tell Tom to harness up, and we’ll drive over to the Country Club to see if they’ve got the election returns yet. Come, dear! Try to be strong and patient.”
“No! I shall not go out to-night one single step. I can’t get that cry out of my head, and I should hear it worse if I were away from the house. Tell me about that terrible old man. Did he kill a man before your eyes?”
“I hate to have you think of him so. He gave me everything, even you.”
She smiled forlornly.
“He was different in nature from us tame folk in the States. He came from a people that drink deep and have fiery passions,—big-boned, strong-hearted people, as gentle as women and as savage as bulls. I’ve seen him—”
“What makes you stop so short, when you are just ready to tell something? I want to hear the worst thing you remember.”
He stammered and hunted for an excuse.
“Come, come. It’s all rot. They tell stories about men. Such a fellow as old Oscar Svenson you must make allowances for, take the good with the bad. There were plenty of better men than he at his worst, but few as good as he at his best. You can’t line such men up with meeting-house folk. I’ll tell you how he saved the Irish family off Keepsake trail, all alone. But it is stifling here. Come out to the terrace, now the rain has stopped.”
There they sat together on a bench in the corner of the terrace, while he told the story of old Oscar’s magnificent courage and will. The big Norwegian had ploughed his way ten miles up the mountains in a blinding snowstorm to carry food to a woman and some children. The woman’s husband was too cowardly to leave the camp. And when old Oscar had reached the cabin, finding one child sick, he had gone back to the camp for medicine.
As Simmons told the story, the stars came out in the soft summer heavens; the damp odor of cut grass filled the air. The parched earth, having drunk, breathed forth. But the woman’s tense gaze never softened. When he had finished, she said:
“Now you must tell me the worst thing he ever did. I will know it!”
“They say he threw a man over a precipice once, and nearly broke his back. The fellow had been stealing water, when there wasn’t enough to go around, and he had had his share. He lied about it, too. Old Oscar just chucked him off the trail like a rat. He would call that justice. I don’t know. That was before I knew him.”
She shivered, and held her husband’s hand more tightly.
“Go on!”
“There were other stories of the same thing; well, we’d call it murder now, maybe!”
And she forced him to tell much—the dark deeds of this old Berserker in his mad rages,—swift, brutal love, murder—all that the furies of blood drive a man to do. Bit by bit, she had them all,—stories whispered here and there on the slopes of mountains, in far-off mining camps and towns, where the Norseman had spent his life; things remembered out of that rough childhood for which she had pitied her husband, for which she had loved him the more, with a woman’s desire to make the bitter sweet. As the soft summer night got on, she heard the story of that killing, the sole one which he had seen with his own eyes. He had locked it tight within his breast all the years since: the quarrel with a friend about some insignificant trifle, the burst of anger, the sudden blow, and then, while the boy tried to part the men, a strange look of wonder on the fierce face from which the red passion was paling. And the next morning forgetfulness of it all!
“But it troubled him always like a bad dream—he could never remember exactly what he had done. He never thought I knew.”
She rose from the bench and walked away from him to the end of the terrace.
“And, my Evelyn,” he pleaded, “you loved me first because he had been all I had had. You asked nothing of me—you gave me all your love gladly.”
He had an uneasy feeling that something strange and impalpable was pushing its way between them.
“Yes,” she murmured. “It was—a long time ago.”
“Seven years. Is that a long time?”
“Yes. I was a girl then. It is always a long time to when one was a girl.”
“It doesn’t seem to me a long time!”
“Well, it’s a great while since, since this came up—like a mountain. The past is on the other side.”
“I don’t know what you mean. No kind of trouble should divide man and wife!”
For a few moments there was silence; then she cried, in the accent of reproach, of accusation:
“Can’t you see? You were his child!”
“Old Oscar’s?... Sometimes I have thought it might be so. I am dark like him. But we can never know it now.”
“I know it! The devil in that bad old man has slept in you and is waking in little Oscar,—my child, my child! That is what you have brought me for my love. I took you because I loved you, because I was mad to have you. I wanted you just for myself, just to give me joy. Now! Now!... I can sit and watch the child who is me fight with that devil. Oh! there is nothing but pain!”
