I
Josephine Stone did not look back after Acey Smith led her down the lakeshore from the spot where she had parted with Louis Hammond. She knew Hammond would neither attempt to follow them nor spy upon them from a distance. Perhaps too she was preoccupied with the tensity of new sensations she did not quite understand. Had she been inclined to mental analysis she might have contrasted the reactions upon herself the presence of the two men brought about; the one frank, buoyant, purposeful and full of the verve and enthusiasm of youth—the other in the prime of his vigour; masterful, grimly fascinating under his cloak of mystery and conscious power.
What discerning, womanly woman is not drawn irresistibly by the type of men who curb tremendous potentialities under a poise that outwardly bespeaks merely good form and the niceties of the occasion? It was not “side” with this man; it was patent he was what he was for a definite purpose. More, to the sensitive intuition of Josephine Stone there appealed from out of the deeps of the personality of Acey Smith a great latent tragedy—a something persistently repressed by that fatalistic mouth that could set so grim and straight—a something that smouldered at times in his brooding eyes and flickered ever so elusively over the face he had taught to be a cold, cruel mask.
If she did not analyse, she at least felt these things in her feminine way. It was this impression, perhaps, that impelled her to say as they strolled to the log seat by the whispering surf: “Sometimes, Mr. Smith, this place seems to me like an enchanted forest—like a dream inset in the prosaic course of everyday life.”
“Does it appeal to you that way, Miss Stone?” He led her to the log seat and dropped down near her. “Strange, isn’t it, how some life-incidents flicker by us with all the glamour of a dream—leaving us wondering, in a floundering sort of way, if it wasn’t a fleeting mirage, so to speak, from some other existence.”
“You express it so wonderfully! You think then that all of us have experienced previous existences on this or some other sphere?”
“Some of us—perhaps.”
“You have felt that here then, the same as I?”
“I have.” Acey Smith lit a cigarette. “You may laugh at the conceit, but at times I could fancy the feel of a basket sword-hilt at my side, the rap-rap of its scabbard-end on my heels and even the jingle of spurs on my boots. Yet, what I believe—”
He broke off and laughed scornfully at his own confession. “What nonsense to be boring you with, Miss Stone!”
“But it’s not nonsense, and you’re not boring me. You must go on,” she commanded, “even if I have to first confess that I have heard the clanking of your knightly sword, the jingling of your spurs—yes, and even felt at my cheek for the beauty-patch I fancied was there.”
His glance met hers, swiftly. If she were merely acting she was intense about it.
“I was going to say that what I believe is that it is a fleeting glimpse of the ideal we experience at such times, and imagination does the rest,” he continued. “Most of us are composites of two or more personalities. Fate, or circumstances if you prefer, decrees which of those personalities shall flourish; the others, like the sucker-shoots of yonder mountain ash tree, aspire but never attain perfection. There is always the Man That Is and the Man That Might Have Been. Saint or sinner, philosopher or fool, there comes sooner or later a time when the Man That Might Have Been insists on life and triumph for his little day.”
“But doesn’t the choice of personality lie pretty much with the man himself?” she argued. “You know they say that every man is the architect of his own fortune.”
“Strong men are ever the playthings of Destiny,” he replied. “So-called masterful men stifle their true selves and accept the role that Fate has ordained alone shall carry them to their goal.”
“That’s cynicism.”
“Must the truth always be sugar-coated? It’s an impression.”
“You speak out of an experience?”
“More or less.” Frankly.
Josephine Stone plunged boldly. “Then, for instance,” she suggested, “the man they call Acey Smith might have been whom?”
“Quite another personality by quite another name.”
“You believe there is something in a name?”
“I do and I do not, Miss Cross-examiner,” he answered enigmatically. “Napoleon might have been born Dick Jones, but in such a case the world would have found another name to call him by.”
She laughed over the allusion. “But you are drifting away from the subject, Mr. Witness,” she reminded. “I asked you about Acey Smith’s Man That Might Have Been.”
“He was a dreamer of high-minded dreams and a scholar; the man Fate shaped and willed should survive was merely him they call Acey Smith the timber pirate.”
“But this Man That Might Have Been.” There was deep concern in her tones. “You could have made him, and you could yet—by the sheer force of your will—make him a reality.”
His black eyes were drawn to hers, and, momentarily, she thought she saw the soul of another man—another who was not Acey Smith. But the softened light in them as quickly changed to a hardened glint.
“No, no,” he said harshly, “that man can never be. I am fighting him off—have been fighting him since—” His gaze swerved from hers as his jaw clicked the balance: “—since you came. His advent now—would mean disaster. I found him too late.”
Anything she might have added was negatived by his changed attitude, a field of reserve, of isolation, he threw around himself at will. “With your permission,” he urged, “we will drop the personal topic with which I have been egotistically monopolising your time. You intimated at our last meeting that you had finally decided to tell me why it was so essential you should meet J.C.X.”
“Oh, yes,” she admitted. “I think I told you there was a very personal matter concerned outside of the unexplained reason for the head of the North Star Company asking me to come here. It was this: A man known as J.C.X. knew something of the affairs of my grandfather, Joseph Stone, a mining prospector, who lived and died in this north country somewhere.”
“Then you knew of the existence of J.C.X. before you received his letter?”
“Yes, through the rather vague statements about J.C.X., the North Star Company and my grandfather made in a field hospital during the great war by a Canadian named Captain Carlstone while in a delirium caused by shell-shock.”
“Yes?” If there was a shock of surprise in this disclosure, Acey Smith’s features did not register it.
“The rest was all conjecture,” Josephine Stone went on. “But let me first tell you the story of Captain Carlstone. When you have heard it you will be the better able to understand my curiosity in the matter.”