The River's End, James Oliver Curwood [read people like a book TXT] 📗

not raise his head. The girl's arms were about him close, and he could feel the warm pressure of her cheek against his hair. The realization of his crime was already weighing his soul like a piece of lead, yet out of that soul had come the cry, "I want you--I want you!" and it still beat with the voice of that immeasurable yearning even as his lips grew tight and he saw himself the monstrous fraud he was. This strange little, wonderful creature had come to him from out of a dead world, and her lips, and her arms, and the soft caress of her hands had sent his own world reeling about his head so swiftly that he had been drawn into a maelstrom to which he could find no bottom. Before McDowell she had claimed him. And before McDowell he had accepted her. He had lived the great lie as he had strengthened himself to live it, but success was no longer a triumph. There rushed into his brain like a consuming flame the desire to confess the truth, to tell this girl whose arms were about him that he was not Derwent Conniston, her brother, but John Keith, the murderer. Something drove it back, something that was still more potent, more demanding, the overwhelming urge of that fighting force in every man which calls for self-preservation.
Slowly he drew himself away from her, knowing that for this night at least his back was to the wall. She was smiling at him from out of the big chair, and in spite of himself he smiled back at her.
"I must send you to bed now, Mary Josephine, and tomorrow we will talk everything over," he said. "You're so tired you're ready to fall asleep in a minute."
Tiny, puckery lines came into her pretty forehead. It was a trick he loved at first sight.
"Do you know, Derry, I almost believe you've changed a lot. You used to call me 'Juddy.' But now that I'm grown up, I think I like Mary Josephine better, though you oughtn't to be quite so stiff about it. Derry, tell me honest--are you AFRAID of me?"
"Afraid of you!"
"Yes, because I'm grown up. Don't you like me as well as you did one, two, three, seven years ago? If you did, you wouldn't tell me to go to bed just a few minutes after you've seen me for the first time in all those--those--Derry, I'm going to cry! I AM!"
"Don't," he pleaded. "Please don't!"
He felt like a hundred-horned bull in a very small china shop. Mary Josephine herself saved the day for him by jumping suddenly from the big chair, forcing him into it, and snuggling herself on his knees.
"There!" She looked at a tiny watch on her wrist. "We're going to bed in two hours. We've got a lot to talk about that won't wait until tomorrow, Derry. You understand what I mean. I couldn't sleep until you've told me. And you must tell me the truth. I'll love you just the same, no matter what it is. Derry, Derry, WHY DID YOU DO IT?"
"Do what?" he asked stupidly.
The delicious softness went out of the slim little body on his knees. It grew rigid. He looked hopelessly into the fire, but he could feel the burning inquiry in the girl's eyes. He sensed a swift change passing through her. She seemed scarcely to breathe, and he knew that his answer had been more than inadequate. It either confessed or feigned an ignorance of something which it would have been impossible for him to forget had he been Conniston. He looked up at her at last. The joyous flush had gone out of her face. It was a little drawn. Her hand, which had been snuggling his neck caressingly, slipped down from his shoulder.
"I guess--you'd rather I hadn't come, Derry," she said, fighting to keep a break out of her voice. "And I'll go back, if you want to send me. But I've always dreamed of your promise, that some day you'd send for me or come and get me, and I'd like to know WHY before you tell me to go. Why have you hidden away from me all these years, leaving me among those who you knew hated me as they hated you? Was it because you didn't care? Or was it because--because--" She bent her head and whispered strangely, "Was it because you were afraid?"
"Afraid?" he repeated slowly, staring again into the fire. "Afraid--" He was going to add "Of what?" but caught the words and held them back.
The birch fire leaped up with a sudden roar into the chimney, and from the heart of the flame he caught again that strange and all-pervading thrill, the sensation of Derwent Conniston's presence very near to him. It seemed to him that for an instant he caught a flash of Conniston's face, and somewhere within him was a whispering which was Conniston's voice. He was possessed by a weird and masterful force that swept over him and conquered him, a thing that was more than intuition and greater than physical desire. It was inspiration. He knew that the Englishman would have him play the game as he was about to play it now.
The girl was waiting for him to answer. Her lips had grown a little more tense. His hesitation, the restraint in his welcome of her, and his apparent desire to evade that mysterious something which seemed to mean so much to her had brought a shining pain into her eyes. He had seen such a look in the eyes of creatures physically hurt. He reached out with his hands and brushed back the thick, soft hair from about her face. His fingers buried themselves in the silken disarray, and he looked for a moment straight into her eyes before he spoke.
"Little girl, will you tell me the truth?" he asked. "Do I look like the old Derwent Conniston, YOUR Derwent Conniston? Do I?"
Her voice was small and troubled, yet the pain was slowly fading out of her eyes as she felt the passionate embrace of his fingers in her hair. "No. You are changed."
"Yes, I am changed. A part of Derwent Conniston died seven years ago. That part of him was dead until he came through that door tonight and saw you. And then it flickered back into life. It is returning slowly, slowly. That which was dead is beginning to rouse itself, beginning to remember. See, little Mary Josephine. It was this!"
He drew a hand to his forehead and placed a finger on the scar. "I got that seven years ago. It killed a half of Derwent Conniston, the part that should have lived. Do you understand? Until tonight--"
Her eyes startled him, they were growing so big and dark and staring, living fires of understanding and horror. It was hard for him to go on with the lie. "For many weeks I was dead," he struggled on. "And when I came to life physically, I had forgotten a great deal. I had my name, my identity, but only ghastly dreams and visions of what had gone before. I remembered you, but it was in a dream, a strange and haunting dream that was with me always. It seems to me that for an age I have been seeking for a face, a voice, something I loved above all else on earth, something which was always near and yet was never found. It was you, Mary Josephine, you!"
Was it the real Derwent Conniston speaking now? He felt again that overwhelming force from within which was not his own. The thing that had begun as a lie struck him now as a thing that was truth. It was he, John Keith, who had been questing and yearning and hoping. It was John Keith, and not Conniston, who had returned into a world filled with a desolation of loneliness, and it was to John Keith that a beneficent God had sent this wonderful creature in an hour that was blackest in its despair. He was not lying now. He was fighting. He was fighting to keep for himself the one atom of humanity that meant more to him than all the rest of the human race, fighting to keep a great love that had come to him out of a world in which he no longer had a friend or a home, and to that fight his soul went out as a drowning man grips at a spar on a sea. As the girl's hands came to his face and he heard the yearning, grief-filled cry of his name on her lips, he no longer sensed the things he was saying, but held her close in his arms, kissing her mouth, and her eyes, and her hair, and repeating over and over again that now he had found her he would never give her up. Her arms clung to him. They were like two children brought together after a long separation, and Keith knew that Conniston's love for this girl who was his sister must have been a splendid thing. And his lie had saved Conniston as well as himself. There had been no time to question the reason for the Englishman's neglect--for his apparent desertion of the girl who had come across the sea to find him. Tonight it was sufficient that HE was Conniston, and that to him the girl had fallen as a precious heritage.
He stood up with her at last, holding her away from him a little so that he could look into her face wet with tears and shining with happiness. She reached up a hand to his face, so that it touched the scar, and in her eyes he saw an infinite pity, a luminously tender glow of love and sympathy and understanding that no measurements could compass. Gently her hand stroked his scarred forehead. He felt his old world slipping away from under his feet, and with his triumph there surged over him a thankfulness for that indefinable something that had come to him in time to give him the strength and the courage to lie. For she believed him, utterly and without the shadow of a suspicion she believed him.
"Tomorrow you will help me to remember a great many things," he said. "And now will you let me send you to bed, Mary Josephine?"
She was looking at the scar. "And all those years I didn't know," she whispered. "I didn't know. They told me you were dead, but I knew it was a lie. It was Colonel Reppington--" She saw something in his face that stopped her.
"Derry, DON'T YOU REMEMBER?"
"I shall--tomorrow. But tonight I can see nothing and think of nothing but you. Tomorrow--"
She drew his head down swiftly and kissed the brand made by the heated barrel of the Englishman's pistol. "Yes, yes, we must go to bed now, Derry," she cried quickly. "You must not think too much. Tonight it must just be of me. Tomorrow everything will come out right, everything. And now you may send me to bed. Do you remember--"
She caught herself, biting her lip to keep back the word.
"Tell me," he urged. "Do I remember what?"
"How you used to come in at the very last and tuck me in at night, Derry? And how we used to whisper to ourselves there in the darkness, and at last you would kiss me good-night? It was the kiss that always made me go to sleep."
He nodded. "Yes, I remember," he said.
He led her to the spare room, and brought in her two travel-worn bags, and turned on the light. It was a man's room, but Mary Josephine stood for a moment surveying it with delight.
"It's home, Derry, real home," she