THE GREAT FIRE
Edward Conway sat on the little porch till the stars came out, wondering why the old nurse did not return. Sober as he was and knew he would ever be, it seemed that a keen sensitiveness came with it, and a feeling of impending calamity.
“Oh, it's the cursed whiskey,” he said to himself—“it always leaves you keyed up like a fiddle or a woman. I'll get over it after a while or I'll die trying,” and he closed his teeth upon each other with a nervous twist that belied his efforts at calmness.
But even Lily grew alarmed, and to quiet her he took her into the house and they ate their supper in silence.
Again he came out on the porch and sat with the little girl in his lap. But Lily gave him no rest, for she kept saying, as the hours passed: “Where is she, father—oh, do go and see!”
“She has gone to Millwood through mistake,” he kept telling her, “and Mammy Maria has doubtless gone after her. Mammy will bring her back. We will wait awhile longer—if I had some one to leave you with,” he said gently, “I'd go myself. But she will be home directly.”
And Lily went to sleep in his lap, waiting.
The moon came up, and Conway wrapped Lily in a shawl, but still held her in his arms. And as he sat holding her and waiting with a fast-beating heart for the old nurse, all his wasted life passed before him.
He saw himself as he had not for years—his life a failure, his fortune gone. He wondered how he had escaped as he had, and as he thought of the old Bishop's words, he wondered why God had been as good to him as He had, and again he uttered a silent prayer of thankfulness and for strength. And with it the strength came, and he knew he could never more be the drunkard he had been. There was something in him stronger than himself.
He was a strong man spiritually—it had been his inheritance, and the very thought of anything happening to Helen blanched his cheek. In spite of the faults of his past, no man loved his children more than he, when he was himself. Like all keen, sensitive natures, his was filled to overflowing with paternal love.
“My God,” he thought, “suppose—suppose she has gone back to Millwood, found none of us there, thinks she had been deserted, and—and—”
The thought was unbearable. He slipped in with the sleeping Lily in his arms and began to put her in bed without awakening her, determined to mount his horse and go for Helen himself.
But just then the old nurse, frantic, breathless and in a delirium of religious excitement, came in and fell fainting on the porch.
He revived her with cold water, and when she could talk she could only pronounce Helen's name, and say they had run off with her.
“Who?”—shouted Conway, his heart stopping in the staggering shock of it.
The old woman tried to tell Jud Carpenter's tale, and Conway heard enough. He did not wait to hear it all—he did not know the mill was now slowly burning.
“Take care of Lily”—he said, as he went into his room and came out with his pistol buckled around his waist.
Then he mounted his horse and rode swiftly to Millwood.
He was astonished to find a fire in the hearth, a lamp burning, and one of Helen's gloves lying on the table.
By it was another pair. He picked them up and looked closely. Within, in red ink, were the initials: R. T.
He bit his lips till the blood came. He bowed his head in his hands.
Sometimes there comes to us that peculiar mental condition in which we are vaguely conscious that once before we have been in the same place, amid the same conditions and surroundings which now confront us. We seem to be living again a brief moment of our past life, where Time himself has turned back everything. It came that instant to Edward Conway.
“It was here—and what was it? Oh, yes:—'Some men repent to God's smile, some to His frown, and some to His fist?'”—He groaned:—“This is His fist. Never—never before in all the history of the Conway family has one of its women—”
He sat down on the old sofa and buried, again, his face in his hands.
Edward Conway was sober, but he still had the instincts of the drunkard—it never occurred to him that he had done anything to cause it. Drunkenness was nothing—a weakness—a fault which was now behind him. But this—this—the first of all the Conway women—and his daughter—his child—the beautiful one. He sat still, and then he grew very calm. It was the calmness of the old Conway spirit returning. “Richard Travis,” he said to himself, “knows as well what this act of his means in the South,—in the unwritten law of our land—as I do. He has taken his chance of life or death. I'll see that it is death. This is the last of me and my house. But in the fall I'll see that this Philistine of Philistines dies under its ruins.”
He arose and started out. He saw the lap robe in the hall, and this put him to investigating. The mares and buggy he found under the shed. It was all a mystery to him, but of one thing he was sure: “He will soon come back for them. I can wait.”
Choosing a spot in the shadow of a great tree, he sat down with his pistol across his knees. The moon had arisen and cast ghostly shadows over everything. It was a time for repentance, for thoughts of the past with him, and as he sat there, that terrible hour, with murder in his heart, bitterness and repentance were his.
He was a changed man. Never again could he be the old self. “But the blow—the blow,” he kept saying, “I thought it would fall on me—not on her—my beautiful one—not on a Conway woman's chastity—not my wife's daughter—”
He heard steps coming down the path. His heart ceased a moment, it seemed to him, and then beat wildly. He drew a long breath to relieve it—to calm it with cool oxygen, and then he cocked the five chambered pistol and waited as full of the joy of killing as if the man who was now walking down the path was a wolf or a mad dog—down the path and right into the muzzle of the pistol, backed by the arm which could kill.
He saw Richard Travis coming, slowly, painfully, his left arm tied up, and his step, once so quick and active, so full of strength and life, now was as if the blight of old age had come upon it.
In spite of his bitter determination Conway noticed the great change, and instinct, which acts even through anger and hatred and revenge and the maddening fury of murder,—instinct, the ever present—whispered its warning to his innermost ear.
Still, he could not resist. Rising, he threw his pistol up within a few yards of Richard Travis's breast, his hand upon the trigger. But he could not fire, although Travis stood quietly under its muzzle and looked without surprise into his face.
Conway glanced along the barrel of his weapon and into the face of Richard Travis. And then he brought his pistol down with a quick movement.
The face before him was begging him to shoot!
“Why don't you shoot?” said Travis at last, breaking the silence and in a tone of disappointment.
“Because you are not guilty,” said Conway—“not with that look in your face.”
“I am sorry you saw my face, then,” he smiled sadly—“for it had been such a happy solution for it all—if you had only fired.”
“Where is my child?”
“Do you think you have any right to ask—having treated her as you have?”
Conway trembled, at first with rage, then in shame:
“No,”—he said finally. “No, you are right—I haven't.”
“That is the only reply you could have made me that would make it obligatory on my part to answer your question. In that reply I see there is hope for you. So I will tell you she is safe, unharmed, unhurt.”
“I felt it,” said Conway, quietly, “for I knew it, Richard Travis, as soon as I saw your face. But tell me all.”
“There is little to tell. I had made up my mind to run off with her, marry her, perhaps, since she had neither home nor a father, and was a beautiful young thing which any man might be proud of. But things have come up—no, not come up, fallen, fallen and crushed. It has been a crisis all around—so I sent for Clay—a fine young fellow and he loves her—I had him meet me here and—well, he has taken her to Westmoreland to-night. You know she is safe there. She will come to you to-morrow as pure as she left, though God knows you do not deserve it.”
Something sprang into Edward Conway's throat—something kin to a joyous shout. He could not speak. He could only look at the strange, calm, sad man before him in a gratitude that uplifted him. He stared with eyes that were blinded with tears.
“Dick—Dick,” he said, “we have been estranged, since the war. I misjudged you. I see I never knew you. I came to kill, but here—” He thrust the grip of his pistol toward Travis—“here, Dick, kill me—shoot me—I am not fit to live—but, O God, how clearly I see now; and, Dick—Dick—you shall see—the world shall see that from now on, with God's help, as Lily makes me say—Dick, I'll be a Conway again.”
The other man pressed his hand: “Ned, I believe it—I believe it. Go back to your little home to-night. Your daughter is safe. To-morrow you may begin all over again. To-morrow—”
“And you, Dick—I have heard—I can guess, but why may not you, to-morrow—”
“There will be no to-morrow for me,” he said sadly. “Things stop suddenly before me to-night as before an abyss—”
He turned quickly and looked toward the low lying range of mountains. A great red flush as of a rising sun glowed even beyond the rim of them, and then out of it shot tinges of flame.
Conway saw it at the same instant:
“It's the mill—the mill's afire,” he said.