"Evie!"
Mrs. Wayne went to the door, but on Ford's assurance that her child had nothing to fear from him, she paused with her hand on the knob to look in curiosity at this wild young man, whose doom lent him a kind of fascination. Again, for a minute, all three were silent in the excess of their surprise. Wayne himself sat rigid, gazing up at the new-comer with strained eyes blurred with partial blindness. Though slightly built and delicate, he was not physically timid; and as the seconds went by he was able to form an idea as to what had happened. He himself, in view of the tumultuous sympathy displayed by hunters and lumber-jacks with the man who passed for their boon companion, had advised Ford's removal from the pretty toy prison of the county-town to the stronger one at Plattsville. It was clear that the prisoner had been helped to escape, either before the change had been effected or while it was taking place. There was nothing surprising in that; the astonishing thing was that the fugitive should have found his way to this house above all others. Mrs. Wayne seemed to think so too, for it was she who spoke first, in a tone which she tried to make peremptory, in spite of its tremor of fear.
"What did you come here for?"
Ford looked at her for the first time—in a blankness not without a dull element of pleasure. It was at least two or three years since he had seen anything so dainty—not, in fact, since his own mother died. At all times his mind worked slowly, so that he found nothing to reply till she repeated her question with a show of increased severity.
"I came here for protection," he said then.
His hesitation and bewildered air imparted assurance to his still astonished hosts.
"Isn't it an odd place in which to look for that?" Wayne asked, in an excitement, he strove to subdue.
The question was the stimulus Ford needed in order to get his wits into play.
"No," he replied, slowly; "I've a right to protection from the man who sentenced me to death for a crime of which he knows me innocent."
Wayne concealed a start by smoothing the newspaper over his crossed knees, but he was unable to keep a shade of thickness out of his voice as he answered:
"You had a fair trial. You were found guilty. You have had the benefit of all the resources allowed by the law. You have no right to say I know you to be innocent."
Wholly spent, Ford dropped into a chair from which one of the children had risen. With his arm hanging limply over the back he sat staring haggardly at the judge, as though finding nothing to say.
"I have a right to read any man's mind," he muttered, after a long pause, "when it's as transparent as yours. No one had any doubt as to your convictions—after your charge."
"That has nothing to do with it. If I charged in your favor, it was because I wanted you to have the benefit of every possible plea. When those pleas were found insufficient by a jury of your peers—"
Ford emitted a sound that might have been a laugh, had there been mirth in it.
"A jury of my peers! A lot of thick-headed country tradesmen, prejudiced against me from the start because I'd sometimes kicked up a row in their town! They weren't my peers any more than they were yours!"
"The law assumes all men to be equal—"
"Just as it assumes all men to be intelligent—only they're not. The law is a very fine theory. The chief thing to be, said against it is that five times out of ten it leaves human nature out of account. I'm condemned to death, not because I killed a man, but because you lawyers won't admit that your theory doesn't work."
He began to speak more easily, with the energy born of his desperate situation and his sense of wrong. He sat up straighter; the air of dejection with which he had sunk to the chair slipped from him; his gray eyes, of the kind called "honest," shot out glances of protest. The elder man found himself once more struggling against the wave of sympathy which at times in the court-room had been almost too strong for him. He was forced to intrench himself mentally within the system he served before bracing himself to reply.
"I can't keep you from having your opinion—"
"Nor can I save you from having yours. Look at me, judge!" He was bolt upright now, throwing his arms wide with a gesture in which there was more appeal than indignation "Look at me! I'm a strong, healthy-bodied, healthy-minded fellow of twenty-four; but I'm drenched to the skin, I'm half naked, I'm nearly dead with hunger, I'm an outlaw for life—and you're responsible for it all."
It was Wayne's turn for protest, and though he winced, he spoke sharply.
"I had my duty to perform—"
"Good God, man, don't sit there and call that thing your duty! You're something more than a wheel in a machine. You were a human being before you were a judge. With your convictions you should have come down from the bench and washed your hands of the whole affair. The very action would have given me a chance—"
"You mustn't speak like that to my husband," Mrs. Wayne broke in, indignantly, from the doorway. "If you only knew what he has suffered on your account—"
"Is it anything like what I've suffered on his?"
"I dare say it's worse. He has scarcely slept or eaten since he knew he would have to pass that dreadful sen—"
"Come! come!" Wayne exclaimed, in the impatient tone of a man who puts an end to a useless discussion. "We can't spend time on this subject any longer. I'm not on my defence—"
"You are on your defence," Ford declared, instantly. "Even your wife puts you there. We're not in a courtroom as we were this morning. Circumstantial evidence means nothing to us in this isolated house, where you're no longer the judge, as I'm no longer the prisoner. We're just two naked human beings, stripped of everything but their inborn rights—and I claim mine."
"Well—what are they?"
"They're simple enough. I claim the right to have something to eat, and to go my way without being molested—or betrayed. You'll admit I'm not asking much."
"You may have the food," Mrs. Wayne said, in a tone not without compassion. "I'll go and get it."
For a minute or two there was no sound but that of her cough, as she sped down a passage. Before speaking, Wayne passed his hand across his brow as though in an effort to clear his mental vision.
"No; you don't seem to be asking much. But, as a matter of fact, you're demanding my pledge to my country. I undertook to administer its laws—"
Ford sprang up.
"You've done it," he cried, "and I'm the result! You've administered the law right up to its hilt, and your duty as a judge is performed. Surely you're free now to think of yourself as a man and to treat me as one."
"I might do that, and still think you a man dangerous to leave at large."
"But do you?"
"That's my affair. Whatever your opinion of the courts that have judged your case, I must accept their verdict."
"In your official capacity—yes; but not here, as host to the poor dog who comes under your roof for shelter. My rights are sacred. Even the wild Arab—"
He paused abruptly. Over Wayne's shoulder, through the window still open to the terrace, he saw a figure cross the darkness. Could his pursuers be waiting outside for their chance to spring on him? A perceptible fraction of a second went by before he told himself he must have been mistaken.
"Even the wild Arab would think them so," he concluded, his glance shifting rapidly between the judge and the window open behind him.
"But I'm not a wild Arab," Wayne replied. "My first duty is toward my country and its organized society."
"I don't think so. Your first duty is toward the man you know you've sentenced wrongly. Fate has shown you an unusual mercy in giving you a chance to help him."
"I can be sorry for the sentence and yet feel that I could not have acted otherwise."
"Then what are you going to do now?"
"What would you expect me to do but hand you back to justice?"
"How?"
There was a suggestion of physical disdain in the tone of the laconic question, as well as in the look he fixed on the neat, middle-aged man doing his best to be cool and collected Wayne glanced over his shoulder toward the telephone on the wall. Norrie Ford understood and spoke quickly:
"Yes; you could ring up the police at Greenport, but I could strangle you before you crossed the floor."
"So you could; but would you? If you did, should you be any better off? Should you be as well off as you are now? As it is, there is a possibility of a miscarriage of justice, of which one day you may get the benefit. There would be no such possibility then. You would be tracked down within forty-eight hours."
"Oh, you needn't argue; I've no intention—" Once more he paused. The same shadow had flitted across the dark space outside, this time with a distinct flutter of a white dress. He could only think it was some one getting help together; and while he went on to finish his sentence in words, all his subconscious faculties were at work, seeking an escape from the trap in which he was taken.
"I've no intention of doing violence unless I'm driven to it—"
"But if you are driven to it—?"
"I've a right to defend myself. Organized society, as you call it, has put me where it has no further claim upon me. I must fight against it single-handed—and I'll do it. I shall spare neither man nor woman—nor woman"—he raised his voice so as to be heard outside—"who stands in my way."
He threw back his head and looked defiantly out into the night. As if in response to this challenge a tall, white figure suddenly emerged from the darkness and stood plainly before him.
It was a girl, whose movements were curiously quick and silent, as she beckoned to him, over the head of the judge, who sat with his back toward her.
"Then all the more reason why society should protect itself against you," Wayne began again; but Ford was no longer listening. His attention was wholly fixed on the girl, who continued to beckon noiselessly, fluttering for an instant close to the threshold of the room, then withdrawing suddenly to the very edge of the terrace, waving a white scarf in token that he should follow her. She had repeated her action again and again, beckoning with renewed insistence, before he understood and made up his mind.
"I don't say that I refuse to help you," Wayne was saying. "My sympathy with you is very sincere. If I can get your sentence commuted—In fact, a reprieve is almost certain—"
With a dash as lithe and sudden as that which had brought him in, Ford was out on the terrace, following the white dress and the waving scarf which were already disappearing down the yew-tree walk. The girl's flight over grass and gravel was like nothing so much as that of a bird skimming through the air. Ford's own steps crunched loudly on the stillness of the night, so that if any one lay in ambush he knew he could not escape. He was prepared to hear shots come ringing from any quarter, but he ran on with the indifference of a soldier grown used to battle, intent on keeping up with the shadow fleeing before him.
He followed her through the garden gate he himself had left open, and down the lane leading to the pasture. At the point where he had entered it from the right, she turned to the left, keeping away from the mountains and parallel with the lake. There was no moon, but the night was clear; and no sound but that of the shrill, sustained chorus of insect life.
Beyond the pasture the lane became nothing but a path, zigzagging up a hillside between patches of Indian corn. The girl sped over it so lightly that Ford would have found it hard to keep her in sight if from time to time she had not paused and waited. When he came near enough to see the outlines of her form she flew on again, less like a living woman than a mountain wraith.
From the top of the hill he could see the dull gleam of the lake with its girdle of lamp-lit towns. Here the woodland began again; not the main body of the forest, but one of its long arms, thrust down over hill and valley, twisting its way in among villages and farm lands. That which had been a path now become a trail, along which the girl flitted with the ease of habit and familiarity.
In the concentration of his effort to keep the moving white spot in view Ford lost count of time. Similarly he had little notion of the distance they were covering. He guessed that they had been ten or fifteen minutes on the way, and that they might have gone a mile, when, after waiting for him to come almost near enough to speak to her, she began moving in a direction at an acute angle to that by which they had come. At the same time he perceived that they were on the side of a low wooded mountain and that they were beating their way round it.
All at once they emerged on a tiny clearing—a grassy ledge on the slope. Through the starlight he could see the hillside break away steeply into a vaporous gorge, while above him the mountain raised a black dome amid the serried points of the sky-line. The dryad-like creature beckoned him forward with her scarf, until suddenly she stopped with the decisive pause of one who has reached her goal. Coming up with her, he saw her unlock the door of a small cabin, which had hitherto not detached itself from the surrounding darkness.
"Go in," she whispered. "Don't strike a light. There are biscuits somewhere, in a box. Grope for them. There's a couch in a corner."
Without allowing him to speak, she forced him gently over the threshold and closed the door upon him. Standing inside in the darkness, he heard the grating of her key in the lock, and the rustle of her skirts as she sped away.
From the heavy sleep of fatigue Ford woke with the twittering of birds that announces the dawn. His first thought before opening his eyes, that he was still in his cell, was dispelled by the silky touch of the Sorrento rugs on which he lay. He fingered them again and again in a kind of wonder, while his still half-slumbering senses struggled for the memory of what had happened, and the realization of where he was. When at last he was able to reconstruct the events of the preceding night, he raised himself on his elbow and peered about him in the dim morning twilight.
The object he discerned most readily was an easel, giving him the secret of his refuge. On the wooden walls of the cabin, which was fairly spacious, water-color sketches were pinned at intervals, while on the mantelpiece above a bricked fireplace one or two stood framed. Over the mantelpiece a pair of snow-shoes were crossed as decorations, between which hung a view of the city of Quebec. On a lay-figure in a corner was thrown carelessly the sort of blanket coat worn by Canadians during winter sports. Paints and palettes were arranged on a table by the wall, and on a desk in the middle of the room were writing materials and books. More books stood in a small suspended bookcase. Beside a comfortable reading-chair one or two magazines lay on the floor. His gaze travelled last to the large apron, or pinafore, on a peg fastened in a door immediately beside his couch. The door suggested an inner room, and he got up promptly to explore it. It proved to be cramped and dark, lighted only from the larger apartment, which in its turn had but the one high north window of the ordinary studio. The small room was little more than a shed or "lean-to", serving the purposes of kitchen and storeroom combined. The arrangements of the whole cabin showed that some one had built it with a view to passing in seclusion a few days at a time without forsaking the simpler amenities of civilized life; and it was clear that that "some one" was a woman. What interested Ford chiefly for the moment was the discovery of a sealed glass jar of water, from which he was able to slake his twenty hours' thirst.
Returning to the room in which he had slept, he drew back the green silk curtain covering the north light in order to take his bearings. As he had guessed on the previous night, the slope on which the cabin was perched broke steeply down into a wooded gorge, beyond which the lower hills rolled in decreasing magnitude to the shore of Champlain, visible from this point of view in glimpses, less as an inland sea than like a chain of lakelets. Sunrise over Vermont flooded the waters with tints of rose and saffron, but made of the Green Mountains a long, gigantic mass of purple-black twisting its jagged outline toward the north into the Hog's Back and the Camel's Hump with a kind of monstrous grace. To the east, in New York, the Adirondacks, with the sunlight full upon them, shot up jade-colored peaks into the electric blue—the scarred pyramid of Graytop standing forth dark, detached, and alone, like a battered veteran sentinel.
In an access of conscious hatred of this vast panoramic beauty which had become the background of his tragedy, Ford pulled the curtain into place again and turned once more to the interior of the room. It began to seem more strange to him the more it grew familiar. Why was he here? How long was he to stay? How was he to get away again? Had this girl caught him like a rat in a trap, or did she mean well by him? If, as he supposed, she was Wayne's daughter, she would probably not be slow in carrying out her father's plan of handing him back to justice—and yet his mind refused to connect the wraith of the night before with either police work or betrayal. Her appearance had been so dim and fleeting that he could have fancied her the dryad of a dream, had it not been for his surroundings.
He began to examine them once more, inspecting the water-colors on the wall one by one, in search of some clew to her personality. The first sketch was of a nun in a convent garden—the background vaguely French, and yet with a difference. The next was of a trapper, or voyageur, pushing a canoe into the waters of a wild northern lake. The next was a group of wigwams with squaws and children in the foreground. Then came more nuns; then more voyageurs with their canoes; then more Indians and wigwams It occurred to Ford that the nuns might have been painted from life, the voyageurs and Indians from imagination He turned to the two framed drawings on the chimney-piece Both represented winter scenes. In the one a sturdy voyageur was conveying his wife and small personal belongings across the frozen snow on a sled drawn by a team of dogs. In the other a woman, apparently the same woman as in the preceding sketch, had fallen in the midst of a blinding storm, while a tall man of European aspect—decidedly not the voyageur—was standing beside her with a baby in his arms. These were clearly fancy pictures, and, so it seemed to Ford, the work of one who was trying to recapture some almost forgotten memory. In any case he was too deeply engrossed by his own situation to dwell on them further.
He wheeled round again toward the centre of the room, impatiently casting about him for something to eat. The tin box, from which he had devoured all the biscuits, lay empty on the floor, but he picked it up and ate hungrily the few crumbs sticking in its corners. He ransacked the small dark room in the hope of finding more, but vainly. As far as he could see, the cabin had never been used for the purpose it was meant to serve, nor ever occupied for more than a few hours at a time. It had probably been built in a caprice that had passed with its completion. He guessed something from the fact that there was no visible attempt to sketch the scene before the door, though the site had evidently been chosen for its beauty.
He had nothing by which to measure time, but he knew that precious hours which he might have utilized for escape were passing. He began to chafe at the delay. With the impulse of youth to be active, he longed to be out, where he could at least use his feet. His clothes had dried upon him; in spite of his hunger he was refreshed by his night's sleep; he was convinced that, once in the open, he could elude capture. He pulled back the curtain again in order to reconnoitre. It was well to be as familiar as possible with the immediate lay of the land, so as to avail himself of any advantages it might offer.
The colors of sunrise had disappeared, and he judged that it must be seven or eight o'clock. Between the rifts of the lower hills the lake was flashing silver, while where Vermont had been nothing but a mass of shadow, blue-green mountains were emerging in a triple row, from which the last veils of vapor were being dragged up into the firmament On the left, the Adirondacks were receding into translucent dimness, in a lilac haze of heat.
With an effort to get back the woodcraft suddenly inspired by his first dash for freedom, he ran his eye over the landscape, noting the points with which he was familiar. To the west, in a niche between Graytop and the double peak of Windy Mountain, he could place the county-town; to the north, beyond the pretty headlands and the shining coves, the prison of Plattsville was waiting to receive him. Farther to the north was Canada; and to the south the great waterway led toward the populous mazes of New York.
With an impatience bordering on nervousness he realized that these general facts did not help him. He must avoid the prison and the county-town, of course; while both New York and Canada offered him ultimate chances. But his most pressing dangers lurked in the immediate foreground; and there he could see nothing but an unsuggestive slope of ash and pine. The rapidity of instinct by which last night he had known exactly what to do gave place this morning to his slower and more characteristic mental processes.
He was still gazing outward in perplexity, when, through the trees beyond the grassy ledge, he caught the flicker of something white. He pressed closer to the pane for a better view, and a few seconds later a girl, whom he recognized as the nymph of last night, came out of the forest, followed by a fawn-colored collie. She walked smoothly and swiftly, carrying a large basket with her right hand, while with her left she motioned him away from the window. He stepped back, leaping to the door as she unlocked it, in order to relieve her of her burden.
"You mustn't do that," she said, speaking quickly. "You mustn't look out of the window or come to the door. There are a hundred men beating the mountain to find you."
She closed the door and locked it on the inside. While Ford lifted her basket to the desk in the centre of the room she drew the green curtain hastily, covering the window. Her movements were so rapid that he could catch no glimpse of her face, though he had time to note again the curious silence that marked her acts. The dog emitted a low growl.
"You must go in here," she said, decisively, throwing open the door of the inner room. "You mustn't speak or look out unless I tell you. I'll bring you your breakfast presently. Lie down, Micmac."
The gesture by which she forced him across the threshold was compelling rather than commanding. Before he realized that he had obeyed her, he was standing alone in the darkness, with the sound of a low voice of liquid quality echoing in his ears. Of her face he had got only the hint of dark eyes flashing with an eager, non-Caucasian brightness—eyes that drew their fire from a source alien to that of any Aryan race.
But he brushed that impression away as foolish. Her words had the unmistakable note of cultivation, while a glance at her person showed her to be a lady. He could see, too, that her dress, though simple, was according to the standard of means and fashion. She was no Pocahontas; and yet the thought of Pocahontas came to him. Certainly there was in her tones, as well as in her movements, something akin to this vast aboriginal nature around him, out of which she seemed to spring as the human element in its beauty.
He was still thinking of this when the door opened and she came in again, carrying a plate piled high with cold meat and bread-and-butter.
"I'm sorry it's only this," she smiled, as she placed it before him; "but I had to take what I could get—and what wouldn't be missed. I'll try to do better in future."
He noted the matter-of-fact tone in which she uttered the concluding words, as though they were to have plenty of time together; but for the moment he was too fiercely hungry to speak. For a few seconds she stood off, watching him eat, after which she withdrew, with the light swiftness that characterized all her motions.
He had nearly finished his meal when she returned again.
"I've brought you these," she said, not without a touch of shyness, against which she struggled by making her tone as commonplace as possible. "I shall bring you more things by degrees."
On a chair beside that on which he was sitting she laid a pair of slippers, a pair of socks, a shirt, a collar, and a tie.
He jumped up hastily, less in surprise than in confusion.
"I can't take anything of Judge Wayne's—" he began to stammer; but she interrupted him.
"I understand your feelings about that," she said, simply. "They're not Judge Wayne's; they were my father's. I have plenty more."
In his relief at finding she was not Wayne's daughter he spoke awkwardly.
"Your father? Is he—dead?"
"Yes; he's dead. You needn't be afraid to take the things. He would have liked to help a man—in your position."
"In my position? Then you know—who I am?"
"Yes; you're Norrie Ford. I saw that as soon as I chanced on the terrace last night."
"And you're not afraid of me?"
"I am—a little," she admitted; "but that doesn't matter."
"You needn't be—" he began to explain, but she checked him again.
"We mustn't talk now. I must shut the door and leave you in the dark all day. Men will be passing by, and they mustn't hear you. I shall be painting in the studio, so that they won't suspect anything, if you keep still."
Allowing him no opportunity to speak again, she closed the door, leaving him once more in darkness. Sitting in the constraint she imposed upon him, he could hear her moving in the outer room, where, owing to the lightness of the wooden partition, it was not difficult to guess what she was doing at any given moment. He knew when she opened the outer door and moved the easel toward the entrance. He knew when she took down the apron from its peg and pinned it on. He knew when she drew up a chair and pretended to set to work. In the hour or two of silence that ensued he was sure that, whatever she might be doing with her brush, she was keeping eye and ear alert in his defence.
Who was she? What interest had she in his fate? What power had raised her up to help him? Even yet he had scarcely seen her face; but he had received an impression of intelligence. He was sure she was no more than a girl—certainly not twenty—and yet she acted with the decision of maturity. At the same time there was about her that suggestion of a wild origin—that something not wholly tamed to the dictates of civilized life—which persisted in his imagination, even if he could not verify it in fact.
Twice in the course of the morning he heard voices. Men spoke to her through the open doorway, and she replied. Once he distinguished her words.
"Oh no," she called out to some one at a distance. "I'm not afraid. He won't do me any harm. I've got Micmac with me. I often stay here all day, but I shall go home early. Thanks," she added, in response to some further hint. "I'd rather not have any one here. I never can paint unless I'm quite alone."
Her tone was light, and Ford fancied that as she spoke she smiled at the passers-by who had thought it right to warn her against himself; but when, a few minutes later, she pushed open the door softly, the gravity that seemed more natural to her had returned.
"Several parties of men have gone by," she whispered. "They have no suspicion. They won't have, if you keep still. They think you have slipped away from here, and have gone back toward the lumber camps. This is your lunch," she continued, hastily, placing more food before him. "It will have to be your dinner, too. It will be safer for me not to come into this room again to-day. You must not go out into the studio till you're sure it's dark. No noise. No light. I've put an extra rug on the couch in case you're chilly in the night."
She spoke breathlessly, in whispers, and, having finished, slipped away.
"You're awfully good," he whispered back. "Won't you tell me your name?"
"Hush!" she warned him, as she closed the door.
He stood still in the darkness, leaving his food untasted, listening to the soft rustle of her movements beyond the wall. Except that he heard no more voices, the afternoon passed like the morning. At the end of what seemed to him interminable hours he knew by acute attention that she hung her apron on its peg, put on her hat, and took up her basket, while Micmac rose and shook himself. Presently she closed the door of the cabin and locked it on the outside. He fancied he could almost hear her step as she sped over the grass and into the forest. Only then did the tension of his nerves relax, as, dropping to his chair in the darkness, he began to eat.
The two or three days that followed were much like the first. Each morning she came early, bringing him food, and such articles of clothing as she thought he could wear. By degrees she provided him with a complete change of raiment, and though the fit was tolerable, they laughed together at the transformation produced in him. It was the first time he had seen her smile, and even in the obscurity of the inner room where she still kept him secluded he noted the vividness with which her habitually grave features lighted up. Micmac, too, became friendly, inferring with the instinct of his race that Ford was an object to be guarded.
"No one would know you now," the girl declared, surveying him with satisfaction.
"Were these things all your father's?" he asked, with a new attempt to penetrate the mystery of her personality.
"Yes," she returned, absently, continuing her inspection of him. "They were sent to me, and I kept them. I never knew why I did; but I suppose it was—for this."
"He must have been a tall man?" Ford hazarded, again.
"Yes, he must have been," she returned, unwarily. Then, feeling that the admission required some explanation, she added, with a touch of embarrassment, "I never saw him—not that I can remember."
"Then he died a long time ago?"
Her reply came reluctantly, after some delay:
"Not so very long—about four years ago now."
"And yet you hadn't seen him since you were a child?"
"There were reasons. We mustn't talk. Some one may pass and hear us."
He could see that her hurry in finishing the small tasks she had come in to perform for him arose not so much from precaution as from a desire to escape from this particular subject.
"I suppose you could tell me his name?" he persisted.
Her hands moved deftly, producing order among the things he had left in confusion, but she remained silent. It was a silence in which he recognized an element of protest though he ignored it.
"You could tell me his name?" he asked, again.
"His name," she said, at last, "wouldn't convey anything to you. It wouldn't do you any good to know it."
"It would gratify my curiosity. I should think you might do as much as that for me."
"I'm doing a great deal for you as it is. I don't think you should ask for more."
Her tone was one of reproach rather than of annoyance, and he was left with a sense of having committed an indiscretion. The consciousness brought with it the perception that in a measure he was growing used to his position. He was beginning to take it for granted that this girl should come and minister to his wants. She herself did it so simply, so much as a matter of course, that the circumstance lost much of its strangeness. Now and then he could detect some confusion in her manner as she served him, but he could see too that she surmounted it, in view of the fact that for him the situation was one of life and death. She was clearly not indifferent to elementary social usages; she only saw that the case was one in which they did not obtain. In his long, unoccupied hours of darkness it distracted his thoughts from his own peril to speculate about her; and when she appeared his questions were the more blunt because of the small opportunity she allowed for asking them.
"Won't they miss you at home?" he inquired, on the next occasion when she entered his cell.
She paused with a look of surprise.
"At home? Where do you mean?"
"Why—where you live; where your mother lives."
"My mother died a few months after I was born."
"Oh! But even so, you live somewhere, don't you?"
"I do; but they don't miss me there, if that's what you want to know."
"I was only afraid," he said, apologetically, "that you were giving me too much of your time."
"I've nothing else to do with it. I shall be only too glad if I can help you to escape."
"Why? Why should you care about me?"
"I don't," she said, simply; "at least, I don't know that I do."
"Oh, then you're helping me just—on general principles?"
"Quite so."
"Well," he smiled, "mayn't I ask why, again?"
"Because I don't like the law."
"You mean that you don't like the law as a whole?—or—or this law in particular?"
"I don't like any law. I don't like anything about it. But," she added, resorting to her usual method of escape, "we mustn't talk any more now. Some men passed here this morning, and they may be coming back. They've given up looking for you; they are convinced you're up in the lumber camps, but all the same we must be careful still."
He had no further speech with her that day, and the next she remained at the cabin little more than an hour.
"It's just as well for me not to excite curiosity," she explained to him before leaving; "and you needn't be uneasy now. They've stopped the hunt altogether. They say there's not a spot within a radius of ten miles of Greenport that they haven't searched. It would never occur to any one that you could be here. Every one knows me; and so the thought that I could be helping you would be the last in their minds."
"And have you no remorse at betraying their confidence?"
She shook her head. "Most of them," she declared, "are very well pleased to think you've got away; and even if they weren't I should never feel remorse for helping any one to evade the law."
"You seem to have a great objection to the law."
"Well, haven't you?"
"Yes; but in my case it's comprehensible."
"So it is in mine—if you only knew."
"Perhaps," he said, looking at her steadily, "this is as good a time as any to assure you that the law has done me wrong."
He waited for her to say something; but as she stroked Micmac's head in silence, he continued.
"I never committed the crime of which they found me guilty."
He waited again for some intimation of her confidence.
"Their string of circumstantial evidence was plausible enough, I admit. The only weak point about it was that it wasn't true."
Even through the obscurity of his refuge he could feel the suspension of expression in her bearing, and could imagine it bringing a kind of eclipse over her eyes.
"He was very cruel to you—your uncle?—wasn't he?" she asked, at last.
"He was very cantankerous; but that wouldn't be a reason for shooting him in his sleep—whatever I may have said when in a rage."
"I should think it might be."
He started. If it were not for the necessity of making no noise he would have laughed.
"Are you so bloodthirsty—?" he began.
"Oh no, I'm not; but I should think it is what a man would do. My father wouldn't have submitted to it. I know he killed one man; and he may have killed two or three."
Ford whistled under his breath.
"So that," he said, after a pause, "your objection to the law is—hereditary."
"My objection to the law is because it is unjust. The world is full of injustice," she added, indignantly, "and the laws men live by create it."
"And your aim is to defeat them?"
"I can't talk any more now," she said, reverting to an explanatory tone of voice. "I must go. I've arranged everything for you for the day. If you are very quiet you can sit in the studio and read; but you mustn't look out at the window, or even draw back the curtain. If you hear a step outside, you must creep in here and shut the door. And you needn't be impatient; because I'm going to spend the day working out a plan for your escape."
But when she appeared next morning she declined to give details of the plan she had in mind. She preferred to work it out alone, she said, and give him the outlines only when she had settled them. It chanced to be a day of drenching summer rain, and Ford, with a renewed effort to get some clew to her identity, expressed his surprise that she should have been allowed to venture out.
"Oh, no one worries about what I do," she said, indifferently "I go about as I choose."
"So much the better for me," he laughed. "That's how you came to be wandering on old Wayne's terrace, just in the nick of time. What stumps me is the promptness with which you thought of stowing me away."
"It wasn't promptness, exactly. As a matter of fact, I had worked the whole thing out beforehand."
His eyebrows went up incredulously. "For me?"
"No, not for you; for anybody. Ever since my guardian allowed me to build the studio—last year—I've imagined how easy it would be for some—some hunted person to stay hidden here, almost indefinitely. I've tried to fancy it, when I've had nothing better to do."
"You don't seem to have had anything better to do very often," he observed, glancing about the cabin.
"If you mean that I haven't painted much, that's quite true. I thought I couldn't do without a studio—till I got one. But when I've come here, I'm afraid it's generally been to—to indulge in day-dreams."
"Day-dreams of helping prisoners to escape. It wouldn't be every girl's fancy, but it's not for me to complain of that."
"My father would have wanted me to do it," she declared, as if in self-justification. "A woman once helped him to get out of prison."
"Good for her! Who was she?"
Having asked the question lightly, in a boyish impulse to talk, he was surprised to see her show signs of embarrassment.
"She was my mother," she said, after an interval in which she seemed to be making up her mind to give the information.
In the manifest difficulty she had in speaking, Ford sprang to her aid.
"That's like the old story of Gilbert à Becket—Thomas à Becket's father, you know."
The historical reference was received in silence, as she bent over the small task she had in hand.
"He married the woman who helped him out of prison," Ford went on, for her enlightenment.
She raised her head and faced him.
"It wasn't like the story of Gilbert à Becket," she said, quietly.
It took some seconds of Ford's slow thinking to puzzle out the meaning of this. Even then he might have pondered in vain had it not been for the flush that gradually over-spread her features, and brought what he called the wild glint into her eyes. When he understood, he reddened in his own turn, making matters worse.
"I beg your pardon," he stammered. "I never thought—"
"You needn't beg my pardon," she interrupted, speaking with a catch in her breath. "I wanted you to know. … You've asked me so many questions that it seemed as if I was ashamed of my father and mother when I didn't answer. … I'm not ashamed of them. … I'd rather you knew. … Every one does—who knows me."
Half unconsciously he glanced up at the framed sketches on the chimney-piece. Her eyes followed him, and she spoke instantly:
"You're quite right. I meant that—for them."
They were standing in the studio, into which she had allowed him to come from the stifling darkness of the inner room, on the ground that the rain protected them against intrusion from outside. During their conversation she had been placing the easel and arranging the work which formed her pretext for being there, while Micmac, stretched on the floor, with his head between his paws, kept a half-sleepy eye on both of them.
"Your father was a Canadian, then?" he ventured to ask, as she seated herself with a palette in her hand.
"He was a Virginian. My mother was the wife of a French-Canadian voyageur. I believe she had a strain of Indian blood. The voyageurs and their families generally have."
Having recovered her self-possession, she made her statements in the matter-of-fact tone she used to hide embarrassment flicking a little color into the sketch before her as she spoke. Ford seated himself at a distance, gazing at her with a kind of fascination. Here, then, was the clew to that something untamed which persisted through all the effects of training and education, as a wild flavor will last in a carefully cultivated fruit. His curiosity about her was so intense that, notwithstanding the difficulty with which she stated her facts, it overcame his prompting to spare her.
"And yet," he said, after a long pause, in which he seemed to be assimilating the information she had given him—"and yet I don't see how that explains you."
"I suppose it doesn't—not any more than your situation explains you."
"My situation explains me perfectly, because I'm the victim of a wrong."
"Well, so am I—in another way. I'm made to suffer because I'm the daughter of my parents."
"That's a rotten shame," he exclaimed, in boyish sympathy "It isn't your fault."
"Of course it isn't," she smiled, wistfully. "And yet I'd rather suffer with the parents I have than be happy with any others."
"I suppose that's natural," he admitted, doubtfully.
"I wish I knew more about them," she went on, continuing to give light touches to the work before her, and now and then leaning back to get the effect. "I never understood why my father was in prison in Canada."
"Perhaps it was when he killed the man," Ford suggested.
"No; that was in Virginia—at least, the first one. His people didn't like it. That was the reason for his leaving home. He hated a settled life; and so he wandered away into the northwest of Canada. It was in the days when they first began to build the railways there—when there were almost no people except the trappers and the voyageurs. I was born on the very shores of Hudson Bay."
"But you didn't stay there?"
"No. I was only a very little child—not old enough to remember—when my father sent me down to Quebec, to the Ursuline nuns. He never saw me again. I lived with them till four years ago. I'm eighteen now."
"Why didn't he send you to his people? Hadn't he sisters?—or anything like that."
"He tried to, but they wouldn't have anything to do with me."
It was clearly a relief to her to talk about herself. He guessed that she rarely had an opportunity of opening her heart to any one. Not till this morning had he seen her in the full light of day; and, though but an immature judge, he fancied her features had settled themselves into lines of reserve and pride from which in happier circumstances they might have been free. Her way of twisting her dark hair—which waved over the brows from a central parting—into the simplest kind of knot gave her an air of sedateness beyond her years. But what he noticed in her particularly was her eyes—not so much because they were wild, dark eyes, with the peculiar fleeing expression of startled forest things, as because of the pleading, apologetic look that comes into the eyes of forest things when they stand at bay. It was when—for seconds only—the pupils shone with a jet-like blaze that he caught what he called the non-Aryan effect; but that glow died out quickly, leaving something of the fugitive appeal which Hawthorne saw in the eyes of Beatrice Cenci.
"He offered his sisters a great deal of money," she sighed, "but they wouldn't take me."
"Oh? So he had money?"
"He was one of the first Americans to make money in the Canadian northwest; but that was after my mother died. She died in the snow, on a journey—like that sketch above the fireplace. I've been told that it changed my father's life. He had been what they call wild before that—but he wasn't so any more. He grew very hard-working and serious. He was one of the pioneers of that country—one of the very first to see its possibilities. That was how he made his money; and when he died he left it to me. I believe it's a good deal."
"Didn't you hate being in the convent?" he asked, suddenly "I should."
"N-no; not exactly. I wasn't unhappy. The Sisters were kind to me. Some of them spoiled me. It wasn't until after my father died, and I began to realize—who I was, that I grew restless. I felt I should never be happy until I was among people of my own kind."
"And how did you get there?"
She smiled faintly to herself before answering.
"I never did. There are no people of my kind."
Embarrassed by the stress she seemed inclined to lay on this circumstance, he grasped at the first thought that might divert her from it.
"So you live with a guardian! How do you like that?"
"I should like it well enough if he did—that is, if his wife did. You see," she tried to explain, "she's very sweet and gentle, and all that, but she's devoted to the proprieties of life, and I seem to represent to her—its improprieties. I know it's a trial to her to keep me, and so, in a way, it's a trial to me to stay."
"Why do you stay, then?"
"For one reason, because I can't help myself. I have to do what the law tells me."
"I see. The law again!"
"Yes; the law again. But I've other reasons besides that."
"Such as—?"
"Well, I'm very fond of their little girl, for one thing. She's the greatest darling in the world, and the only creature, except my dog, that loves me."
"What's her name?"