FOR a few seconds after John Boland's departure, Harrington sat pondering wretchedly. "Yes; that's the thing," he decided. "Chuck the whole mess. I'm not up to it."
But by now, Jailor White, having noted the manner of John Boland's departure and reflected upon it, felt himself impelled to break in upon Henry immediately, and to guarantee against interruptions this time, he closed the door behind him and turned the key in the lock. "Gee! You must have soaked Old Two Blades between the eyes!" he remarked, gazing in awe upon the man who could do such a thing.
"It was coming to him," affirmed Harrington, seething still.
"I'll tell 'em," agreed White with diplomatic emphasis. "But say! I was starting to tell you about Miss Billie coming down here the night of the fire."
For a moment Harrington's face wore a silly, staring look, as if someone might have clipped him behind the ear with a black-jack. Then he lifted himself, slowly at first, while his voice deepened with incredulous amazement. "Billie Boland . . . down here . . . the night of the fire?" He had ended by leaping to his feet while his hands reached out fiercely to the jailor as if he would tear the story out of him. "What for? . . . Who for?" he pleaded excitedly.
"Well, she didn't say who," qualified White cannily; "but . . ." And then, while Harrington held him madly by the shoulders, shaking the story out of him, urging continually, "Yes, yes; go on, man; go on!" the jailor told him all about it.
"Oh, my God!" breathed Harrington like a prayer of thanksgiving, as he pushed White from him. "Why, then, she—she did care for me—enough to come for me at the first sign of any immediate danger." He stood a moment drinking in the significance of what he had heard, a wondrous smile of heart-happiness forming on his lips, the lines in his face filling, his figure straightening, his head going up as he adjusted himself to the perception that she had loved him all the while and that there must be some key that furnished a satisfying solution of her conduct.
"Billie!" he trumpeted exultingly, his voice breaking with the sheer weight of its joy into something mellow and marvelously revealing of the depths of his passion for the girl. "Bil-lie!" and it seemed as if he were calling to her, far away in Humboldt House.
"White, you blundering old coot, you! Why didn't you tell me this before?" he demanded, at the same time reaching for his hat, when there came a tap on the locked door, faint and muffled, as from a gloved knuckle. The two men exchanged inquiring glances in a kind of strained silence. "Now, what the" White started to ejaculate, then felt his way noiselessly around the table to the door and opened it.
Pale and perturbed, Billie Boland stood there—in her shapeless tweed coat, in her little cloth hat, the brim of which had been pulled moodily low but was now alertly up; and out from under it her blue pain-filled eyes gazed in doubt and fear, wonder and glory upon the paralyzed person of Henry Harrington. Her lips tremblingly framed a word but her spirit could not utter it.
"Billie!" her lover exclaimed, and leaped for her. "Billie!" In one hoarse inarticulate cry, all the anguish, all the bitterness of his sore heart emptied itself, and he swept her rapturously into his arms; yet not to cover her tremulous lips with kisses. The moment, the event, was too sacred to him even for the interchange of that most sacred of tokens between lovers. Instead he gathered her closely in his arms and, as making sure that she was there, pressed her soft cheek upon his, head bowed over her shoulder in acknowledgment to God of this inestimable gift while between his lids, closed in a transport of happiness, there streamed grateful tears. So he held her! She had come! She was there! He already knew enough to make sure that misunderstandings would be explained. Love would justify itself to love.
"The key is on the inside of the door, Henry!" shouted a far-away voice, and the rapt man broke out of his delirium long enough to note that White had somehow vanished and that the door was closed. He reached out and gave the key precautionary attention; yet with his first motion became aware that Billie began gently to put hersclf away from him.
"But you—you did love me—didn't you dear? . . . You did believe in me every minute?" he began to importune, clinging as if he would refuse to lose her.
"Yes, oh, yes, Henry! Of course I loved you!" she sighed with painful intensity. "Of course I believed in you; but—" the blue eyes, lifting themselves now to his, were shame-charged—"but—I failed you!"
"You did hurt me, Billie," Henry admitted soberly, feeling that the sooner some things came out the sooner they could be put behind forever. "But there must have been some reason," he conceded quickly; then urged gently: "Why was it, dear, that you didn't send—didn't come to me?"
"Because I was a jealous cat!" she accused herself bitterly.
"Jealous? . . . You? Billie!" Henry was both incredulous and tenderly reproachful.
"Although at first it was just because I loved you," she recalled, her distressed features beautiful in their perfect candor.
"Because you loved me?" Harrington asked, perplexed.
"Yes," she averred with a nod of simple conviction. "I thought I was helping to save you."
This was what had sounded so preposterous when Lahleet had told it to him; but it fell differently from Billie's white lips, the dear! She had actually believed it.
"Besides, Henry," Billie explained—entirely in the tone of self-indictment, not at all in self-justification—"you'd hurt my pride by refusing to let me persuade you out of your course, as I'd boasted to father I could. But the chamber of commerce meeting was the worst. I actually thought it was you who were traitor to your town, Henry." Her voice quavered and her blue eyes filled with horror of herself. "Oh, I was bitter at you—until they went further and put you in jail on that absurd murder charge." As she said this, her voice got a shudder in it and the deeps of the eyes glowed with a reminiscent indignation—glowed beautifully to Henry's delighted perception. "Then I was wild at them all. By morning I think I should have rushed down to tear your bars away myself, but that"
"Yes? Yes?" demanded Henry eagerly.
"But that little Miss Marceau came and told me you were breaking under the strain. That gave me hope—hope that you were going to turn and be sensible—be one of us again. Oh, wasn't I a fool? You standing like a rock, and me trying to make another—another—Scanlon out of you. But that's what I was, and so each day I said to my heart: 'O heart, be hard! Be hard for Henry's sake!' But finally I couldn't be hard any longer. I was dressed and ready to rush to you when father told me about that little teacher-woman being on the island with you. That's when I turned into a jealous cat, Henry! From that moment there wasn't a chance that I would come. Oh, Henry, wasn't it shameful?" Her face reddened, and unable to bear even his sympathetic glance, with its surprised light of growing comprehension, she turned from him entirely and dropped into a chair, yet not weakly—dropped into it to sit bolt upright, staring out the window, breathing fast, utterly indignant with herself.
Harrington stood confounded at perceiving how comprehensible all her actions and reactions had been, once he got her point of view. He was not only deeply touched but moved to a new admiration for that stern slender figure, so utterly out of patience with itself. "Oh, Billie!" he was going to cry out to her in remorse when she, in a plaintive little voice, eyes still turned out the window, and, not in extenuation at all, merely as completing the record, recalled:
"Of course you'd never told me anything about you and this little teacher-woman being so—so well acquainted."
Henry's eyes widened, his heart stabbed with a memory of guilty concealments of—of nothings, that had become significant because they were concealments—for no other reason.
"And after," she went on, still in that plaintive, non-accusing voice, "after they put you in jail, you—you didn't send me word or anything—offer me any explanation—say that you wanted to hear from me or—anything."
"Yes; my accursed pride!" groaned Henry, outraged to perceive how he had expected everything and offered nothing. Ruthless with himself now, determined this girl should prove herself entirely innocent of that coldness of heart of which he had accused her so bitterly, he reminded her calculatingly: "But for two hours now—ever since they arrested Scanlon, you have known there was nothing in any of it but just a damnable plot."
"Oh, before that," she explained quickly, eyebrows lifted high in the fulness of her candor, "ever since the court decision and the other great upsetting things, the mob and the fire and all, every instinct cried out that you had been right in everything. Oh, from that moment you have seemed a heroic, a tragic, a triumphant figure to me; but"—a look of deeper distress came into her face—"but then it was too late," she whispered hoarsely, pulling at her hands. "Because if—if—if I wouldn't go to you when the daughter of John Boland was somebody, I couldn't come to you when she was nobody."
"But, dear"
"And while I was just, just wringing my hands," she went on, with now a pathetic little cry in her every word, "that—that teacher-woman went out and saved you—saved you by finding the real murderer weeks before anyone else might have done it. Hers was a real helpful love. Mine was just—" she was laboring pitifully now—"just selfish and useless like—like me! She's entitled to you, Henry. I release you from your engagement. That's what I came to tell you. Oh, Henry!"
At last she had burst into tears and lowered her face into her hands; but even then she had not done with the indictment: "Oh, I've been so disappointed with myself," she sobbed through her fingers. "I thought I was strong, but I've been weak. I thought I was keen, but I've been blind. Oh, Henry! I've been so wrong—so wrong all the way."
Harrington stood quite astounded—at her—at himself; for he was strangely gratified by these tears. He'd seen her in tears before, of course; petulant storms of weeping that came after thwarting or bafftement of some sort; but those were tears of defeat. These, he discerned, were tears of triumph—tears of victory over herself. Why—he gazed more startled still, with a sudden feeling that he had been bereft of something—why, his old Billie, imperious, self-willed, self-sufficient, was gone. But there had come a new Billie, this contrite, broken blossom of a woman, humbly winsome, helplessly appealing as she proposed a most astounding sacrifice. Why, she was finer in every way, more lovable than the old Billie, who had swept him into raptures enough. He wanted to fall down and worship this Billie. Yet his first duty was to lighten the burden of her self-reproaches. They were too many, too unjust.
"Why, you were loving me all the while, dear," he soothed her in a voice breaking with the weight of its sympathetic devotion.
"But I didn't do a thing," she wailed, inconsolable.
"You came down to the jail the night of the fire."
Abruptly the girl lifted her tear-stained face with a new fright upon it. "That—that jailor told on me," she divined; then managed a sporting half-smile.
"Yes; he did," said Henry with satisfaction; "but only just before you got here or I'd have been spared a good deal and got to you sooner; for I'd already had a chance to know how you were feeling that night because I saw you."
"Saw me?" breathed Billie, beautiful in her surprise and incomprehension.
"Yes. When you came to the jail I wasn't even here. I'd gone up to Humboldt House to make sure that you were safe. I was in the rose garden when you came back—you passed within a yard of me; I stood within a foot of you."
"You—you were there? In the rose garden?" She beamed up at him, her eyes jeweled by their late moisture. "Oh, I can't believe it! And I was wanting you so! But—the woman outside," she suddenly remembered, bitter with herself but still firm in her resolution. "She has won the right to you. Go! Go to her quick, or—oh, Henry, dear, I—I can't stand it; I can't!" Her face was white again, lips quivering, tears starting.
But Harrington could smile quite light-heartedly now. "Say, girl; come out of it!" he commanded, but with a lump of welling joy in his throat. "Love doesn't go by rights, Billie. Love goes by—by itself; by whims, by attractions, by—I can't tell you what. But mine goes all to you. I should have been concealing something if I hadn't admitted that your silence stung me terribly. In fact my love for you seemed to die in each of those awful nights; but it came to life each morning. Only today it was dead again, I thought; till White told me of your visit to the jail; and then it came alive again forevermore. You speak of shame, but you've made me a thousand times ashamed that I ever doubted you or reproached you. Now I know, Billie, that you were as right all the time as I thought I was. Our love is a deathless thing; yours couldn't be killed and mine couldn't.
"Here we are together, Billie, in the least romantic place in the world, this dingy old jail, in this tobacco-smelling office of Larry White's; but it all fades away. We're alone—alone on a mountainpeak. God and the sunlight are all around us, and the pulse of love sings in our veins. I want you, Billie; I want you, and I'm going to take you."
"In spite of everything?" she cried up to him timidly, her face lighting brilliantly with that new glory which had been growing upon it all the while her lover had been speaking.
"Because of everything," he answered fondly.
With a long, happy sigh, she rose to his embrace and he took her. But after what they two had passed through, it was withal a spiritual embrace; tenderness rather than heat; devotion, adoration rather than passion characterized it; and its breathless moments were followed presently by little bursts of confidence.
"We understand each other this time," Henry reflected gratefully; "you take me for what I am."
"And you take me for what I'm not," Billie said with a little laugh. "Oh, Henry! My money's gone, I haven't got a thing but you; and I never felt so rich in all my life. And, oh, I'm so glad I couldn't bend you—make you into a conceited imperialist of business. You remembered the little cases still, and it's because you were true in the little things that you made good in the big things."
"You're the first big thing I ever made good in," insisted Henry fondly, "and I came near messing that. We'll get married and we'll shake the ashes of this place off our feet and get away and never see it again."
"Never see it again?" Billie exclaimed in amazement. "Why, you're going to be receiver of Boland General," she told him, and in her blue eyes there was just a faint return of the old imperiousness, and it made her wonderfully attractive.
"Oh, am I?" ejaculated Henry, suddenly doubtful as he looked into those violet deeps and began to take new account of all that lay behind them.
"Why, yes, Henry; you are," she told him, though not imperiously; merely as reminding him of a duty.
As accepting the reminder Harrington turned, still with his arm around the slender grace in the tweed coat beneath which he could feel a heart beating so happily—turned and looked out upon that scarred, chimney-stabbed segment of ruins that lay beneath his vision and with his mind's eye also that wide band of mourning on both sides the inlet where the Boland erections had been. He saw it all and the chaos in the hearts of the citizens as well—he saw the task it would be and slowly his mind kindled to it. To resuscitate, to re-create, to organize anew and on a right basis this little sector of the world-front, to build again and build better—this was a job worth while if ever a worth-while job was offered to a man. And it was his for the taking. He remembered his Salisheutte Indians too, with vast business problems thrust upon them; and the Shell Point Indians with the millions of oil beneath their feet—and both tribes trusting him, needing him.
Billie was watching his absorbed face concernedly. "We haven't gone through all—all this to be just selfish at the last, when we've gained each other, have wef" she asked, giving his arm an intimate squeeze.
He looked at her startled. "No, no; of course not, dear, "he confessed, and felt himself somehow sublimated and consecrated to unselfishness forever because of this priceless treasure within the circle of his arm.
"Yes, we'll—we'll stay right here. We'll have our honeymoon 'on the lot,' as they say in moviedom."
Three days later many things had happened. Various courts had appointed Henry Harrington receiver of Boland General and of numbers of its subsidiaries. The Commissioners of the Land Office and of Indian Affairs had both telegraphed from Washington to Henry an appointment as special agent. Another Shell Point Land Company was to be organized, of which Henry Harrington was to be president, and Lahleet Marceau, vice-president; for she had reconsidered her determination to return to the blanket. She too had consulted her better self and found that she could not desert.
Yellow piles of lumber and red piles of brick began to fleck the ruins, machinery was being ordered, a vast program of reconstruction was being inaugurated; and one way and another, officially or unofficially, Henry Harrington was in the forefront of it all. Tsar of the Zone, someone had already called him playfully.
But most important of all to the two people concerned, Henry and Billie had been married. On this, the first morning of their wedded life, Billie was reminding Henry: "'Member that lofty talk of mine once about the world wanting producers—stuff I'd heard father use—and me mourning over you because you weren't a producer—only a lawyer? Well, Henry, dear, you're going to be the greatest producer of all—a producer of happiness; and most of all to me!"
The bride kissed her husband ecstatically and he accepted the caress with evidences of satisfaction; then warned: "You know, Billie, hardly anybody is as big, as important as they think they are, or as other people may think. Let's just play our part kind of—kind of small. Let's, as you sort of hinted the other day—let's try to make good in the little things and trust the big things to take care of themselves."
"Which reminds me," said Billie; "for one little thing, I'm going to have the Salzberg children sent up to the house this morning—until their father can do for them."
[The end]