The Portal of Dreams

by Charles Neville Buck

"Do you think your welcome is very prompt?"

I stiffened and flushed. Could she be so blindly indifferent as not to know that I had taken myself off in misery and loneliness only because I was not cad enough to intrude on that meeting? And now she permitted herself to grow piqued over the only evidence of consideration it lay in my power to show her.

"Do you think I could have done otherwise?" I inquired.

"I think if I were a man, and a woman had come across the mountains—" she halted suddenly and colored. Then she added in an altered tone of flat indifference, "It doesn't matter."

For a moment I stood there with no answer to frame. Her words bewildered me. So she might have spoken had she been free or affianced to me. I was standing above her looking down and her eyes, with the same pained wideness, were looking at some picture which the flickering flames and white embers held for her imagination. Then I understood. Her words were not after all really addressed to me. She, too, was thinking of the man asleep in the huge four-post bed who had not awakened to receive her, and upon me was falling the expression of what was in her heart because I was the only person with whom she could speak. Since he had not aroused himself she had noticed my absence. Had it been otherwise I should have been forgotten. It was the final note of my quaint and unprecedented torture that I should come in as her husband's proxy for a chiding that should have been his.

For the next few moments I stood helplessly silent. Outside I heard the distant baying of hounds off on some ungoverned chase. She sat there while the longings in my heart welled and the reason in my brain reeled, until I could feel only one thing—that she should belong to me; that my arms should enfold her—that everything which balked that end was a monstrous and hideous injustice. Then as a drunken man may suddenly sink into the irresponsible vagueness that carries him into total irresponsibility, the tidal wave mastered me. There was an inarticulate sound in my throat; something between a groan and a sob, which must have startled her, for she looked suddenly up, and as she did so I dropped to my knees beside her and carried both her hands to my lips. She flinched back with a sudden little start of astonishment, but I was now the primitive creature bereft of sanity and I gathered her to me and crushed her in my arms and covered the cool softness of her cheeks and eyes and lips with my kisses until they flushed hot and crimson. In an instant the thing was over. A wave of returning reason swept me like a sluicing from a bucket of ice-water, and I came to my feet sane and unspeakably mortified. She was still sitting very silent and her flushed color had at once died to pallor. Her eyes were wide with mystified incomprehension. Her lips moved, but shaped no words. I tried to speak, but the sense of my outrageous conduct stifled me.

She could not understand and I could not tell her, of all the torture which had so culminated. After this, even should the powers of miracle clear away every other obstacle between us, she would never listen. I heard my voice groan miserably, and with no further effort at explanation or apology, I walked, or rather stumbled, to the peg where my coat hung beside the door and let myself out into the night.

Where I went I could not say. I was tramping along with the aimlessness of the man whose steps are unguided. My one conscious intention was to keep going, to kill the rest of the night and to try, as best I might to bring myself to such a point of sanity that with to-morrow morning I could return and take my medicine with at least the dignity of the condemned criminal. Vaguely I planned self-destruction—after I had faced whatever ordeal awaited me first and I had met the obligation of supporting Marcus in court. I should tell the two of them my story and let them at least realize that before I had become the madman and the brute I had been through such things as might craze a man. Weighborne was not the sort of husband who would tamely pass without punishment such an affront to his wife and himself. I hoped that his method of reprisal would be summary. That would bring a sort of relief, yet for her sake he must let me be my own executioner, that it might end there.

The night was all a-sparkle under the moonlight, and the air, spiced with frost, went into the lungs with the tingling stimulation of needles. I tramped endlessly along the road, and all the heat of my paroxysm cooled into a chill of self-contempt. Still I had no definite idea of where I was going—I was simply plunging ahead in an effort to burn up with physical exertion the restlessness and misery that possessed me.

It was only when I had walked and run alternately for hours, frequently halting to sit by the roadside and curse myself, that I realized I must have come a long way from the house of Cal Marcus, and that the night must be well spent. I might not have even then returned to a realization of outward things had I not heard the sound of voices and the patter of unshod hoofs on the roadbed. Some roistering riders of the night were making their late way home, and had I been in a less heedless mood, Marcus' frequent injunction and the things I myself had seen would have prompted me to avail myself of the concealment offered by the fence row's tangle. But these matters were all far from my thoughts, and I merely turned back to the side to let the horsemen pass. I was walking with my head downcast at a point where the moon bathed the road, when the horses behind broke into a canter. As they passed me one of the riders, with a surprised shout to his companions, wheeled his mount to a halt just before me.