Читать книгу Empty Hands - Stringer Arthur - Страница 7

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Endicott went up to his room, but he did not sleep. He sat at his open window overlooking the pool, which took on fantastic shadows under the filtered light of the late moon. Claire, he saw, had gone back to the Roman bench. He could make her out only vaguely, in the broken shadows, sitting inert and motionless, with her hands clasped over her knee. The solitariness of her figure distressed him as he watched it. She had grown away from him, calamitously, just as he had grown away from her. She was all he had, he remembered for the second time that night. She was all he had, yet of late he had seen little of her, had known tragically little of her companionship.

That, in some way, would have to be corrected. Yet he could see no immediate promise of change in his mode of life. And he could anticipate still less in hers. Before another week was over he would be once more on the wing: this time it was the Little Elk Lake project that was demanding his presence. Within two weeks he would be well beyond the rail-head, half-way up to the Circle itself, trafficking by canoe and york-boat toward the Barrier Camp on the fringe of the Barren Grounds. There Shomer Grimshaw held disturbingly ambitious plans to lay before his attention. That restless-souled young engineer even wanted a portable saw-mill and a hydroplane and a shallow-draught side-wheeler sent up in sections to his wilderness outpost beyond the Pas. And there was a showing of gold in the pre-Cambrian to the east of Barrier Lake. And the sooner Endicott was on the ground to look over his claims the better for all concerned.

The thought suddenly occurred to him that he might do worse than take his Clannie along with him. That would get her out of the welter into which she had drifted. It would lift her out of that cloying mess, the same as one lifts a drowning mouse out of a cream-pitcher. She was ear-deep in enervating softnesses that were smothering her, the same as so many women of to-day were being smothered. And the other thing would rather shock her into some sort of reason. She would find herself confronted by raw life, up in that mine camp. She would face sterner conditions and stabilizing roughnesses and a man or two with a backbone. And that would do her good.

Endicott stopped short, trying to picture Shomer Grimshaw, his field-engineer, confronted by a girl like Clannie. She would be new to him, for women had never seriously entered into Grimshaw's scheme of things. He had not permitted them to. It was not without reason that he had been called Shomer, the Watcher. But Endicott had no wish to bring that old story up out of the depths of the past. He preferred to think of Grimshaw as functioning like a Diesel engine, efficient and silent, as self-contained as a Salteaux, but by instinct and training still a woodsman, a man who preferred always to go ahead of the steel and map the lonelier frontiers for those who came after him. He had seen much of the world, but he preferred to remember only his woodcraft. He had a working knowledge of seven Indian languages and could shoulder a barrel of flour over a broken portage, but in his sleeping-tent he read Pater and Francis Thompson. No, a man like Grimshaw could never grow into an understanding of a girl like Claire. She would be something undecipherable to that single-track mind of his. She would probably knock his camp discipline into a cocked hat and criticize the grub-tent cuisine and announce that the smell of fly-oil was objectionable to her fastidious young nostrils. It would, ten to one, result in trouble. For Clannie, of course, liked to have her own way. And Shomer, on the other hand, knew a grimness of purpose that had proved not without its value. In his rough young veins ran that commendable enough thing that has been called the blood of the conqueror. And Endicott, lounging at the open window, wondered half idly which of the two would win out, if it ever came to some final contest of will.

Then he noticed that the low-hung moon had gone under a cloud. He heard a growl or two of distant thunder and felt grateful for what he accepted as a promise of relief from the heat that was making even midnight intolerable. Men didn't think straight in such weather. And what he needed was sleep. But before turning back to his bed he stared once more down at the vague outlines of the pool.

Claire was smoking there. He could see the small cherry-glow of her moving cigarette-end and the dark blur of her body against the pale marble bench. Then his eye wavered on to the other end of the pool, attracted by what seemed a movement along the trellised foliage. He thought, for a moment, he saw a figure in white, a woman's figure, walking slowly along the wistaria-covered pergola, in the direction of the Roman bench. He pressed his face against the bronze screening, staring out with an odd quickening of the pulse. Then, with an incredulous upthrust of the shoulders, he rubbed his eyes and looked out again. He could no longer decipher that drifting white shadow. He turned back to his room with what was almost a grunt of impatience.

"This heat's getting on my nerves," he said as he switched on his oscillating fan and pushed the bed out so that it would stand in the fuller play of its current. He lay down and covered himself with a sheet. But he did not sleep. He was thinking about his daughter.

He was still thinking about her, inconsequently and barrenly, when his wakeful ear caught the sound of his bedroom door being opened. He sat up at once as the vague blur of a figure crept in through the door.

"Father!"

It was his daughter Claire, calling to him in a voice thin with terror.

"What is it?" he asked as she groped, cowering, toward him. "What's happened?"

She sat down on the edge of the bed, feeling for his body in the darkness, craving, for the first time he could remember, some sustaining contact with him.

"What's happened?" he repeated as he became conscious of the tremor of her hand, which felt cold through the sheet.

"Something terrible," she said in a strangled whisper.

"But what is it?" he demanded. "Are you all right?"

She drew a long and quavering breath.

"Yes, I'm all right," she finally asserted. "But it—it was terrible."

"What was?" he insisted, letting his hot hand close about her cool small fingers.

"Mother came back to the pool," the girl said in a quiet voice.

There was a silence of several seconds.

"You've been dreaming, child," Endicott was finally able to say. Yet an odd tingle of nerve-ends ran through his body as he spoke.

"She came to where I was sitting on the bench there," asserted the quiet but tremulous voice so close to him. "She was in white. I could see her distinctly, even before she spoke to me."

"You've been dreaming," repeated the girl's father.

"I tell you she came and spoke to me. She came and sat beside me and asked me not to go."

"Go where?" asked Endicott, reaching for the light-switch. But for some undefined reason he declined to turn it on.

The girl on the edge of the bed sat silent for several moments. Then she spoke, even more quietly than before.

"Milt Bisnett and I were going to run away to-night. We were to motor over to Morristown and then take a morning train in to New York to catch the steamer for Bermuda. We intended to stay there until Milt's wife could—could arrange about the divorce."

She moved abruptly in the darkness.

"Good God!" gasped Endicott, out of the silence.

"That's off now, of course," she said in her incomprehensibly quiet voice.

"Off? I should think it is off!" cried the man on the bed, startled by the vastness of his suddenly revealed inadequacy. "Do you know what you're going to do, Claire?"

"No," she said, almost indifferently.

"When I go north on Saturday, you're coming with me."

"Going with you?" she repeated, her thoughts obviously not on what she was saying.

"Into clean, hard life, out of this muck," he announced with unlooked-for vigor.

So prolonged was her silence that he felt she was casting about for excuses, searching for some avenue of escape.

"All right," she said in her small voice. "I'll go!"

He found it hard to articulate a question obscurely clamoring for expression.

"It's—it's not too late?" he exacted.

She sat silent a moment, letting the full significance of his question filter through to her brain.

"It's not too late," she replied. The listlessness of her tone would have disheartened him, but for the tightening of the small fingers about his moist hand. Then she asked, almost dully, out of still another silence: "Why should she come back, like that?"

He compelled himself to stroke her shoulder reassuringly.

"You must have fallen asleep, child, and dreamed it," he valorously contended. But he felt the shiver that passed through her thin body.

"Do you mind if I leave the door open, between our rooms?" she asked as she rose to her feet.

"Of course, Clannie," he said, doing his best to control his voice, shaken as he was by the unexpected forlornness of her tones.

She groped toward him in the darkness.

"Good night, father," she cried, with her thin arms clinging to him.

And Endicott, with his hand on her childishly bobbed hair, kissed her for the first time that he could remember.