The Tempering

by Charles Neville Buck

"You ask me first to forget that you are anything more to me than an old friend. Then you ask me to obey your whim in doing what is next to impossible," he summarized in a coldly ironical voice. "You are setting me very easy tasks tonight!"

"Any one can do the easy things." The contempt in her clear tone was not for him. It was not accusing, but it seemed to wither the men of lesser strength and subtly to pay him tribute by its indirection, and then abruptly she played her strongest card: "Victor McCalloway, your teacher, didn't school you to seek the easy way."

Once more the anger darted in his eyes, but he flinched at the name as though under a lash.

"Why need we bring Mr. McCalloway into this discussion?" he indignantly demanded. "Perhaps I understand him better than you. Mr. McCalloway is no apostle of tame submission."

Anne caught the tempestuous note of protest, and she caught, as well, the meaning that actuated it; Boone's self-denied unwillingness to confront the accusing thought of his hero. That name she had studiously refrained from mentioning until now.

"And yet you know that what I am saying might come from his own lips. You know that if he were here and you left this house tonight to lead a mob of incendiaries and gunmen over the ridge you couldn't go with his blessing or his handshake. You know that you'd have to leave behind you a man whose respect you'd forfeited and whose heart you'd broken."

She stopped, and the voice that came to her was strained as it questioned: "Is that all you've got to say?"

Anne shook her head. "No," she told him, "there's one thing more—a request. Please don't answer me for five minutes."

Boone Wellver jerked his head with a gesture that might have been either acquiescence or refusal. But from his pocket he drew a watch and stood holding it in his hand. The tight-drawn muscles of his face made it a painful thing to watch, and after a little while he turned from her and she could see only his back—with shoulders that twitched a little from time to time under the spasmodic assault of some torturing thought. She was glad that she could not see his eyes. Had there been any place of retreat, save that room where death lay, she would have fled, because when a man stands in his place of Gethsemane he should be alone.

But before Boone's mental vision, a vision from which a bloody and darkening veil seemed to be drawing slowly aside, were passing pictures out of his memory. He saw grave eyes, clouded with the embarrassment of talking self, as the tall figure of Victor McCalloway stood in the woods admitting that he had refused a commission in China, because a mountain boy might need him in his fight against an inherited wormwood of bitterness. He saw himself now an apostate to a faith he had embraced; a doctrine he had both learned and taught. Boone Wellver was waking out of an ugly trance, but he was not waking without struggle, not without counter waves that threatened to engulf him again, not without the sweat of agony.