The House Of A Thousand Candles/Chapter 29

He had been to see Sister Theresa, and Marian was walking with him to the gate. I saw her quite plainly in the light that fell from the lamp overhead. A long cloak covered her, and a fur toque capped her graceful head. My grandfather and his guide were apparently in high spirits. Their laughter smote harshly upon me. It seemed to shut me out,—to lift a barrier against me. The world lay there within the radius of that swaying light, and I hung aloof, hearing her voice and jealous of the very companionship and sympathy between them.

But the light led me. I remembered with bitterness that I had always followed her,—whether as Olivia, trailing in her girlish race across the snow, or as the girl in gray, whom I had followed, wondering, on that night journey at Christmas Eve; and I followed now. The distrust, my shattered faith, my utter loneliness, could not weigh against the joy of hearing that laugh of hers breaking mellowly on the night.

I paused to allow the two figures to widen the distance between us as they traversed the path that curved away toward the chapel. I could still hear their voices, and see the lantern flash and disappear. I felt an impulse to turn back, or plunge into the woodland; but I was carried on uncontrollably. The light glimmered, and her voice still floated back to me. It stole through the keen winter dark like a memory of spring; and so her voice and the light led me.

Then I heard an exclamation of dismay followed by laughter in which my grandfather joined merrily.

“Oh, never mind; we’re not afraid,” she exclaimed.

I had rounded the curve in the path where I should have seen the light; but the darkness was unbroken. There was silence for a moment, in which I drew quite near to them.

Then my grandfather’s voice broke out cheerily.

“Now I must go back with you! A fine person you are to guide an old man! A foolish virgin, indeed, with no oil in her lamp!”

“Please do not! Of course I’m going to see you quite to your own door! I don’t intend to put my hand to the lantern and then turn back!”

“This walk isn’t what it should be,” said my grandfather, “we’ll have to provide something better in the spring.”

They were still silent and I heard him futilely striking a match. Then the lantern fell, its wires rattling as it struck the ground, and the two exclaimed with renewed merriment upon their misfortune.

“If you will allow me!” I called out, my hand fumbling in my pocket for my own match-box.

I have sometimes thought that there is really some sort of decent courtesy in me. An old man caught in a rough path that was none too good at best! And a girl, even though my enemy! These were, I fancy, the thoughts that crossed my mind.

“Ah, it’s Jack!” exclaimed my grandfather. “Marian was showing me the way to the gate and our light went out.”

“Miss Devereux,” I murmured. I have, I hope, an icy tone for persons who have incurred my displeasure, and I employed it then and there, with, no doubt, its fullest value.

She and my grandfather were groping in the dark for the lost lantern, and I, putting out my hand, touched her fingers.

“I beg your pardon,” she murmured frostily.

Then I found and grasped the lantern.

“One moment,” I said, “and I’ll see what’s the trouble.”

I thought my grandfather took it, but the flame of my wax match showed her fingers, clasping the wires of the lantern. The cloak slipped away, showing her arm’s soft curve, the blue and white of her bodice, the purple blur of violets; and for a second I saw her face, with a smile quivering about her lips. My grandfather was beating impatiently with his stick, urging us to leave the lantern and go on.

“Let it alone,” he said. “I’ll go down through the chapel; there’s a lantern in there somewhere.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” she remarked; “but I recently lost my best lantern!”

To be sure she had! I was angry that she should so brazenly recall the night I found her looking for Pickering’s notes in the passage at the Door of Bewilderment!

She had lifted the lantern now, and I was striving to touch the wax taper to the wick, with imminent danger to my bare fingers.

“They don’t really light well when the oil’s out,” she observed, with an exasperating air of wisdom.

I took it from her hand and shook it close to my ear.

“Yes; of course, it’s empty,” I muttered disdainfully.

“Oh, Mr. Glenarm!” she cried, turning away toward my grandfather.

I heard his stick beating the rough path several yards away. He was hastening toward Glenarm House.

“I think Mr. Glenarm has gone home.”

“Oh, that is too bad!” she exclaimed.

“Thank you! He’s probably at the chapel by this time. If you will permit me—”

“Not at all!”

A man well advanced in the sixties should not tax his arteries too severely. I was quite sure that my grandfather ran up the chapel steps; I could hear his stick beating hurriedly on the stone.

“If you wish to go farther”—I began.

I was indignant at my grandfather’s conduct; he had deliberately run off, leaving me alone with a young woman whom I particularly wished to avoid.

“Thank you; I shall go back now. I was merely walking to the gate with Mr. Glenarm. It is so fine to have him back again, so unbelievable!”

It was just such a polite murmur as one might employ in speaking to an old foe at a friend’s table.

She listened a moment for his step; then, apparently satisfied, turned back toward St. Agatha’s. I followed, uncertain, hesitating, marking her definite onward flight. From the folds of the cloak stole the faint perfume of violets. The sight of her, the sound of her voice, combined to create—and to destroy!—a mood with every step.

I was seeking some colorless thing to say when she spoke over her shoulder:

“You are very kind, but I am not in the least afraid, Mr. Glenarm.”

“But there is something I wish to say to you. I should like—”

She slackened her step.

“Yes.”

“I am going away.”

“Yes; of course; you are going away.”

Her tone implied that this was something that had been ordained from the beginning of time, and did not matter.

“And I wish to say a word about Mr. Pickering.”

She paused and faced me abruptly. We were at the edge of the wood, and the school lay quite near. She caught the cloak closer about her and gave her head a little toss I remembered well, as a trick compelled by the vagaries of woman’s head-dress.

“I can’t talk to you here, Mr. Glenarm; I had no intention of ever seeing you again; but I must say this—”

“Those notes of Pickering’s—I shall ask Mr. Glenarm to give them to you—as a mark of esteem from me.”

She stepped backward as though I had struck her.

“You risked much for them—for him”—I went on.

“Mr. Glenarm, I have no intention of discussing that, or any other matter with you—”

“It is better so—”

“But your accusations, the things you imply, are unjust, infamous!”

The quaver in her voice shook my resolution to deal harshly with her.

“If I had not myself been a witness—” I began.

“Yes; you have the conceit of your own wisdom, I dare say.”

“But that challenge to follow you, to break my pledge; my running away, only to find that Pickering was close at my heels; your visit to the tunnel in search of those notes,—don’t you know that those things were a blow that hurt? You had been the spirit of this woodland to me. Through all these months, from the hour I watched you paddle off into the sunset in your canoe, the thought of you made the days brighter, steadied and cheered me, and wakened ambitions that I had forgotten—abandoned —long ago. And this hideous struggle here,—it seems so idle, so worse than useless now! But I’m glad I followed you,—I’m glad that neither fortune nor duty kept me back. And now I want you to know that Arthur Pickering shall not suffer for anything that has happened. I shall make no effort to punish him; for your sake he shall go free.”

A sigh so deep that it was like a sob broke from her. She thrust forth her hand entreatingly.

“Why don’t you go to him with your generosity? You are so ready to believe ill of me! And I shall not defend myself; but I will say these things to you, Mr. Glenarm: I had no idea, no thought of seeing him at the Armstrongs’ that night. It was a surprise to me, and to them, when he telegraphed he was coming. And when I went into the tunnel there under the wall that night, I had a purpose—a purpose—”

“Yes?” she paused and I bent forward, earnestly waiting for her words, knowing that here lay her great offending.

“I was afraid,—I was afraid that Mr. Glenarm might not come in time; that you might be dispossessed,—lose the fight, and I came back with Mr. Pickering because I thought some dreadful thing might happen here—to you—”

She turned and ran from me with the speed of the wind, the cloak fluttering out darkly about her. At the door, under the light of the lamp, I was close upon her. Her hand was on the vestibule latch.

“But how should I have known?” I cried. “And you had taunted me with my imprisonment at Glenarm; you had dared me to follow you, when you knew that my grandfather was living and watching to see whether I kept faith with him. If you can tell me,—if there an answer to that—”

“I shall never tell you anything—more! You were so eager to think ill of me—to accuse me!”

“It was because I love you; it was my jealousy of that man, my boyhood enemy, that made me catch at any doubt. You are so beautiful,—you are so much a part of the peace, the charm of all this! I had hoped for spring—for you and the spring together!”

“Oh, please—!”

Her flight had shaken the toque to an unwonted angle; her breath came quick and hard as she tugged at the latch eagerly. The light from overhead was full upon us, but I could not go with hope and belief struggling unsatisfied in my heart. I seized her hands and sought to look into her eyes.

“But you challenged me,—to follow you! I want to know why you did that!”

She drew away, struggling to free herself

“Why was it, Marian?”

“Because I wanted—”

“Yes.”

“I wanted you to come, Squire Glenarm!”

Thrice spring has wakened the sap in the Glenarm wood since that night. Yesterday I tore March from the calendar. April in Indiana! She is an impudent tomboy who whistles at the window, points to the sunshine and, when you go hopefully forth, summons the clouds and pelts you with snow. The austere old woodland, wise from long acquaintance, finds no joy in her. The walnut and the hickory have a higher respect for the stormier qualities of December. April in Indiana! She was just there by the wall, where now the bluebird pauses dismayed, and waits again the flash of her golden sandals. She bent there at the lakeside the splash of a raindrop ago and tentatively poked the thin, brittle ice with the pink tips of her little fingers. April in the heart! It brings back the sweet wonder and awe of those days, three years ago, when Marian and I, waiting for June to come, knew a joy that thrilled our hearts like the tumult of the first robin’s song. The marvel of it all steals over me again as I hear the riot of melody in meadow and wood, and catch through the window the flash of eager wings.

My history of the affair at Glenarm has overrun the bounds I had set for it, and these, I submit, are not days for the desk and pen. Marian is turning over the sheets of manuscript that lie at my left elbow, and demanding that I drop work for a walk abroad. My grandfather is pacing the terrace outside, planning, no doubt, those changes in the grounds that are his constant delight.

Of some of the persons concerned in this winter’s tale let me say a word more. The prisoner whom Larry left behind we discharged, after several days, with all the honors of war, and (I may add without breach of confidence) a comfortable indemnity. Larry has made a reputation by his book on Russia—a searching study into the conditions of the Czar’s empire, and, having squeezed that lemon, he is now in Tibet. His father has secured from the British government a promise of immunity for Larry, so long as that amiable adventurer keeps away from Ireland. My friend’s latest letters to me contain, I note, no reference to The Sod.

Bates is in California conducting a fruit ranch, and when he visited us last Christmas he bore all the marks of a gentleman whom the world uses well. Stoddard’s life has known many changes in these years, but they must wait for another day, and, perhaps, another historian. Suffice it to say that it was he who married us—Marian and me—in the little chapel by the wall, and that when he comes now and then to visit us, we renew our impression of him as a man large of body and of soul. Sister Theresa continues at the head of St. Agatha’s, and she and the other Sisters of her brown-clad company are delightful neighbors. Pickering’s failure and subsequent disappearance were described sufficiently in the newspapers and his name is never mentioned at Glenarm.

As for myself—Marian is tapping the floor restlessly with her boot and I must hasten—I may say that I am no idler. It was I who carried on the work of finishing Glenarm House, and I manage the farms which my grandfather has lately acquired in this neighborhood. But better still, from my own point of view, I maintain in Chicago an office as consulting engineer and I have already had several important commissions.

Glenarm House is now what my grandfather had wished to make it, a beautiful and dignified mansion. He insisted on filling up the tunnel, so that the Door of Bewilderment is no more. The passage in the wall and the strong box in the paneling of the chimney-breast remain, though the latter we use now as a hiding-place for certain prized bottles of rare whisky which John Marshall Glenarm ordains shall be taken down only on Christmas Eves, to drink the health of Olivia Gladys Armstrong. That young woman, I may add, is now a belle in her own city, and of the scores of youngsters all the way from Pittsburg to New Orleans who lay siege to her heart, my word is, may the best man win!

And now, at the end, it may seem idle vanity for a man still young to write at so great length of his own affairs; but it must have been clear that mine is the humblest figure in this narrative. I wished to set forth an honest account of my grandfather’s experiment in looking into this world from another, and he has himself urged me to write down these various incidents while they are still fresh in my memory.

Marian—the most patient of women—is walking toward the door, eager for the sunshine, the free airs of spring, the blue vistas lakeward, and at last I am ready to go.