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CHAPTER XXVII
THE VOICE IN THE HURRICANE

Their sufferings, as the days went crawling into weeks, attained a certain dead level of wretchedness. At that level, should nothing worse befall, they felt that they might exist through the eight months of their imprisonment; beyond that level lay deliverance by death. So they kept a painstaking account of time, and made a sort of solemn ceremony of that hour when, as night let down its black curtain before the entrance of the cavern, Marion cut another notch in the wall, and they clasped hands in a brave effort at good cheer, and said to each other, “One more! One more!”

The cold had steadily increased until it was just barely endurable. By day it was possible to combat it in some measure, but at night they were stung and tortured by the frost that invaded the cave, and defied their meager clothing. If they tried lying closely side by side with their blankets spread over them, the cold crept under the coverings, and bit through their garments into their emaciated limbs. If they wrapped themselves tightly in the blankets, one pair to each, and lay near the fire, they were able to catch only a few fitful moments of sleep before the frost on one side and the heat on the other forced them to move.

At inexorable intervals the fire must be replenished. Heavy with sleep that was not sleep, feeble from lack of nourishment, and stiff from cold, Marion would rise and stumble to the nearest heap of wood, and carefully lay two or three pieces on the dying embers. The fire itself was to Marion a source of continual dread; for not only did it consume their precious and unrenewable supply of wood with a terrifying voracity, but she was fairly obsessed by the fear that she might let it go out. In that event they might never waken, clutched by the cold in their sleep; or wakening, find that something had happened to the matches. There remained a good store of these in the box enfolded carefully in a bit of cloth and a strip of deerskin, and bestowed in a high niche of the cavern; but there was sometimes moisture in the night winds, and there could be no absolute assurance that the matches would ignite in an emergency.

The winds blew irregularly, sometimes roaring through the cave, and filling it with a whirl of smoke and snow, and sometimes creeping along the floor with the malevolence and stealthiness of a serpent. Marion had blocked up the entrance with small logs and limbs, but the winds and draughts made scorn of this loose barrier. Her clothes were fast falling from her body. She essayed crude patchwork with strips of deerskin and pins of wood, but these efforts were rendered futile by wear and tear and the rotting of the cloth itself. She began to be embarrassed when her flesh showed through the rents in her garments; but Haig, with a mingling of frankness and tact that might indeed have been less easy in other circumstances, effectually helped her to banish all false modesty from a situation in which they were reduced to primitive habits and almost to primitive familiarities.

She was less able to accustom herself to the dirt, from which there was no escape, but which irked her nevertheless more than all else. She was no longer able to keep clean in any sense of cleanliness associated with civilization. Washing with water melted from snow, without soap or towels, had only the effect, as it seemed to her, to fix the grime more deeply in her skin. And the hair that had been her pride had now no more the golden lights in its tawny masses, and was becoming dark and harsh and sheenless in spite of her most assiduous attention.

“Don’t worry!” said Haig one day, in a grim attempt at humor. “Just imagine you are a belle of the Eskimos.”

“Philip! How can you?” she cried.

“Washing,” he went on, “is only another error of civilization. I have seen whole tribes of most respectable aborigines that never bathed. And they seemed to be quite happy. It saves a lot of time. But that’s another queer thing. The more time we need, the more we waste it on matters that are really unimportant. Like most of our attempts to improve on nature, it costs more than it’s worth, and–”

“That will do, Philip!” she protested. “I can forget I’m hungry, but–ugh! not this!”

But she spoke too bravely about her hunger. Their food by this time had begun to pall. The good venison, of which they had eaten joyously at first, became tasteless and then disgusting. They had no salt. The bacon and the bread had long since been consumed, and the chocolate also. There was left nothing but the flesh of deer and rabbits. Marion stewed it, broiled it, baked it under hot ashes; and they even nibbled at it raw; but the time came when only the relentless pangs of hunger, the hunger of the animal, the sheer clamor of their stomachs could force them to eat the nauseating food. In consequence of this revulsion, they were always hungry; and sometimes, in spite of their resolution, they descended to torturing each other with talk of the good things there were in the world to eat.

“Claire makes the most gorgeous apple dumplings!” said Marion on one of these occasions.

“Apple dumplings? Ye-es,” replied Haig judiciously. “But what about plain dumplings in chicken gravy?”

“Fricassee!” cried Marion.

“No. Maryland.”

“Still, Philip, if I had my choice it wouldn’t be chicken at all.”

“What then?”

“Potatoes. Big, baked potatoes, split open, you know, with butter and salt and paprika.”

“Or sweet potatoes swimming in butter.”

“And salad–lettuce and tomatoes and oil and vinegar.”

“And then pie. Think of blackberry pie!”

“And jam. I do love jam spread on toast.”

“I’ll tell you something,” said Haig recklessly. “I could even eat sauerkraut!”

Their worst craving was for salt. Marion could fairly taste the spray of the Atlantic on the bathing beaches. She dreamt of salt,–barrels of salt and oceans of salt and caves she had read of in which salt hung in glittering stalactites. And Haig too. He described a desert where salt had risen to the surface and gleamed in crystals in the sand. And once he had lived a long time on salt pork, which he had thought the most insufferable food. But now! The taste of it came back to him, and went tingling through every nerve.

To free their minds from such tormenting memories, Haig went deep into his adventures, his wanderings, his search for excitements. He told her of strange lands and peoples, of the beautiful spots of the world, of battles and perils and escapes,–everything he had been through, with one exception. That–the story of Paris–was still a closed book to her. And similarly, there was one chapter of her life that she did not open to him. A certain delicacy, rendered more vital by their very situation, in which few delicacies could be maintained, restrained them from the uttermost self-revelation. The one subject that was not touched upon in the most intimate of their conversations was that dearest to Marion’s heart and most incomprehensible to Haig’s reason. Partly this avoidance was intuitive, and partly deliberate; where there was so much suffering that could not be escaped, they were scrupulous to inflict upon each other no unnecessary pain or embarrassment. Between a more common man and a less fastidious woman, placed in such propinquity, there would almost inevitably have been concessions and compromises but between these two there remained a barrier that might have been passed by Marion’s unquestioning love, but never by Haig’s inclinations, curbed as they had been through many years, and still reined in by his distrust.

The day came when it seemed safe for Haig to stand and to move a little about the cave. He had fashioned slowly a pair of rude crutches, if they could be so called,–two pine limbs trimmed down with his pocketknife, with their natural forks left to fit under his arms. Marion protested that he was attempting this feat much too soon, but she was compelled to watch him in an agony of suspense lest he should fall on the hard floor of the cave, or rest his weight on the injured leg, and so undo all that had cost them so much of care and labor. But caution restrained him; for he was aware of the danger, though he was also half-mad with impatience to be a man once more. Venturing only a few tentative steps at first, he steadily accustomed himself to movement with the aid of the awkward crutches, and in a few days was able to take up some of the work of their wretched habitation. Marion saw that this pleased him immensely, almost as if he had been a boy entrusted with a man’s responsibility; and once, too, she saw him stand a long time before the row of notches on the wall, and thought his figure straightened, and a flush came into his pale cheek.

And then, in the sixth week of their imprisonment, Marion fell ill. She had caught a cold, which was not the first by any means, but much more severe than its predecessors. With watery eyes and red noses and distressing coughs they had become familiar, but this was plainly a more serious matter. For three days more she dragged herself about, trying to conceal her state from him and from herself, but crying softly when he did not see her.

One morning, as the dawn crept into the cavern, she tried as usual to rise from her hard bed, and fell back with a stifled moan. Haig heard her, and raised his head quickly, struck by an unaccustomed note in her low cry.

“What is it, Marion?” he asked in alarm.

“It’s no use, dear!” she whispered. “I can’t get up.”

For a moment he lay stricken, incapable of thought. Not that the event was unexpected. He had been reckoning on that; he had seen her steadily failing, and knew that she could not go on indefinitely under such privations. And yet, when it came, it was appalling. The grayness of the cave settled down upon him like a pall. Once he would have been indifferent to it, resigned to the knowledge that it was inevitable. But now he had come, if not to share her hope, at least to sympathize with it, and to wish ardently for her sake that her faith might be justified. And it seemed a pitiable thing that she should have been deceived, an intolerable thing that she should die there so uselessly,–for him.

He moved over to her, and placed his hand on her forehead. It was burning hot.

“Water, please!” she gasped.

He hobbled to the entrance, and brought a cupful of snow, and melted it over the fire. She drank the water greedily, and begged for more. But he told her gently that she must wait a little while. Then he sat thinking. What should be done with fever? It would probably be pneumonia, or something as fatal. And it would take her as the north wind takes the drooping petals of a rose.

He bent over her, and tried to soothe her with such futile words as came. The look she gave him went straight into deep, dark cells of his being that he thought had been closed and sealed forever. She begged him to eat; he must cook his own breakfast. Oh, but he must eat, or he should not be able to help her, she said. She would be quite well in a day or two; she was sure of that; and he must not get sick too. After he had been so patient and so good to her!

Haig turned away with a groan, and tried to obey her. But eat? Eat that repulsive food that he had choked down these many days only to please her, only to subscribe to her foolish faith? He could not! But presently she raised her head, and saw that he was not eating, and chided him. Whereupon he swallowed some morsels of the venison, and assured her that he had eaten heartily.

All that day she lay there, her face flushed, her eyes gleaming with a brightness that was more than the brightness of her indomitable spirit. When she smiled up at him he turned his face away that she might not see what he knew was written on it. And then he realized how much that smile had come to mean to him–how all unawares he had come to covet and to prize it–how he had half-consciously of late resorted to unexpected words and gestures to coax it to her lips.

There was no sleep for either of them that night. The next day Marion grew steadily worse, and toward evening she became delirious. And there was no concealment in this delirium as there had been in his. All that he had not seen and heard and guessed before was now wholly revealed to him. He was permitted to see deep into the pure soul of the girl, into her very heart that was brimming over with love for him. His name came riding on every breath. It was Philip, Philip, Philip! And bit by bit, and fragment by fragment, he heard all the pitiful story of her love, of her petty stratagems, of the wicked little plot she had made, of the traps from which he had extricated himself, of the pretended sprain in her ankle, of her watching and waiting, of the anguish he had caused her, of her solitary communion with the stars on Mount Avalanche, of her dismissal of Hillyer, of her faith in the love that should not be denied and unrequited, of her prayers for a miracle that should bring him to her at last.

He looked down at the poor, small foot in its ragged shoe; yes, that was the foot that was “sprained.” And how it had trudged, and dragged itself along for him, when every bone and muscle of her body ached! He looked at her hands, thin even in their swollenness, raw and bleeding, hard as a laborer’s on the palms. How they had toiled and bled for him! For him! And what about him? What about Philip Haig?

He leaned back from her, and closed his eyes. And suddenly it seemed as if something fell away from them, as if something that had bound and imprisoned and blinded him had been rudely shattered. In one terrible, torturing revelation he saw clearly what he had been, what he had done, what a miserable wreck he had made of life, what a pitiable, dwarfed, misshapen thing his soul had become in comparison with the soul of this girl whom he had despised. He saw that he had lived a life of almost untouched egoism, setting his own wrongs above all the other wrongs in the world, counting his own griefs the greatest of all griefs, nursing his own tragedy as if it had been the first tragedy and the last. Bitterly, remorselessly he reviewed his selfishness, his hatred, his senseless rage, the heartlessness wrought by himself in a nature that had been, in the beginning, as pure, if not as precious and fine and beautiful, as hers.

And that was not all. He had taken woman for the special object of his hatred. He had made himself believe that all women were alike. Was there, then, only one kind of woman in a world filled with many kinds of men? Because he had been a fool, because he had been deceived by one woman, he had concluded, in his folly, that every woman was a vampire or a parasite,–“a rag and a bone and a hank of hair”!

And now there lay before him indeed (and the words took on a new and more terrible meaning) “a rag and a bone and a hank of hair.” Yes, this was all that was left of her. This was what he had made of the most joyous and most beautiful creature that had ever crossed his path; this was the best he could do for one who had had the misfortune to love him and the courage to tell him so. This was his work! His memory went back to that day before the post-office. How beautiful she was then, how strangely beautiful, coming out of that halo of light by the side of the golden outlaw. Something had stirred within him then, as it had stirred again and again: at Huntington’s when she reached for his revolver; in his cottage that last afternoon of her nursing. And he had repulsed it, put it down, and trampled on it, as if it had been an execrable thing instead of the very treasure he had been seeking all his life without knowing what he sought. And now he recognized it for what it was–too late!

He bent nearer to her, listening.

“Philip! Philip!” she was saying, in tender, coaxing accents, with that quivering of her chin that had many times been almost irresistible.

Then came the final break-up of everything within him. He felt lifted as upon a flood, and a wild and passionate longing surged through all his being. He leaned swiftly over her, and clasped her in his arms, and pressed her hot cheek against his own. And then–it was unendurable; he felt one of her arms softly encircling his neck. There was just one gentle pressure, and then the arm fell to her side, and her head sank weakly away from him. He laid her back tenderly on her hard bed.

He sat up again, looking at her and listening. She rambled on in half-coherent speech. She had not heard him cry out her name; or if she had heard him it had been only a part of her fevered dreams. And this was the crowning bitterness: that he should want to speak to her, to tell her that he loved her, and she could not hear; that he was too late, and she would never know.

He leaped to his feet in a whirling tempest of rage. He stumbled to the mouth of the cave, and thrust himself half through the barricade, and looked out into the wilderness of snow, and stood shaking his fist at it, quivering with passion, and uttering the wildest imprecations upon the world, upon the outlaw, and upon himself. And gradually they centered upon himself alone; and he stood presently, as it were, naked before God, with something like a prayer unspoken, a silent, voiceless petition rising from his tortured soul.

He became calm after that. A curious peace, it seemed, had flowed in upon him. Mechanically he renewed the fire, brought water and held it to Marion’s lips, and eased her position on the bed. Then he sat by her side to wait!

Well, this was the end. She would be going soon,–to-morrow, or the day after. He glanced toward the shelf where Marion’s rifle and his revolver lay. She would not be there now to snatch the weapon from his hand! But she would be waiting for him. And there came back to him the strange feeling he had experienced in his cottage–the pressure of her hand still warm on his own–her hand helping up and up and out of the Valley of the Shadow. And her hand would be stretched out for him–in the Beyond–

It must have been about the middle of the next forenoon–he had ceased to reckon time, and there were no more notches cut on the black wall of the cave–when Philip, sitting at Marion’s side, observed a curious, restless movement of her head. She had lain all morning in a stupor, very still, with only an occasional murmur from her dry lips. But now, moving her head from side to side, she tried to lift it, as if to listen.

“What is it, Marion?” asked Haig, leaning close to her.

“Listen!” she whispered.

He obeyed her, or pretended to, and turned an ear toward the mouth of the cavern. The wind was up with its wailing and its snarls and shrieks. He heard it for a moment, then looked at her again.

“My poor girl! My poor Marion!” he said.

“Listen!” she repeated, with a touching emphasis, almost childish, almost petulant.

He heard the storm.

“Yes, Marion,” he said, humoring her.

“Can’t you hear it?” she pleaded. “Listen!”

It was the delirium again; she was hearing things that were not, except in her disordered mind. Perhaps–he had read somewhere that the dying, those of them that are pure at heart, sometimes hear the calling of the–

“Somebody’s–coming!” she cried in the thinnest, most childlike treble. Her face shone; she tried to sit up; she raised one hand feebly toward him.

“Please lie down, dear!” pleaded Haig, pressing her gently back.

She resisted him, smiling and frowning at the same time.

“Be–very–still. And–listen!” she persisted.

To please her, he sat erect, and listened. They were very still then, one of her hands between both of his. And the storm was raging. It was wilder, wilder. All the fury of Thunder Mountain seemed to be behind the wind that came shrieking and bellowing down the gulch.

The seconds passed, with dead silence in the cave, and that bedlam let loose outside.

Then suddenly Haig lifted his head. What was it? There seemed to have come–No, it was but a mocking voice of the hurricane, one of the myriad voices of that wintry inferno, mocking them with a half-human cry. He looked sadly down at Marion, and saw that wondrous smile again upon her emaciated face. Oh, but this was maddening! Yet because she wished it, he listened again. And then, out of that tumult–very faint and far–

“My God! My God!” he shouted.

He leaped to his feet. He forgot his crutches. He flung himself across the floor of the cave in three reckless bounds, flung himself on the barrier of logs and limbs, clawing it like a maniac, or a wild beast, tore his way through it, and stood in the snow on the platform, calling into the storm, shrieking, bellowing, out-shrieking and out-bellowing the storm, swaying dizzily in the wind, and clutching at the air before him in a frenzy.