CHAPTER XV THE MAN WHO HAD FORGOTTEN
If the man who had been the subject of the observations Jessica had heard had been less absorbed, as he walked leisurely along on the opposite side of the street, he would have noticed the look of dislike in the eyes of those he passed. They drew away from him, and one spoke—to no one in particular and with an oath offensive and fervid. But weather-beaten, tanned, indifferently clad, and with a small brown dog following him, the new-comer passed along, oblivious to the sidelong scrutiny. He did not stare about him after the manner of a stranger, though, so far as he knew, he had never been in the place before. So far as he knew—for Harry Sanderson had no memories save those which had begun on a certain day a month before in a box-car. He walked with eyes on the pavement, absorbed in thoughts of his own.
But Harry Sanderson now was not the man who had ridden into oblivion in the motor-car. The rector of St. James was in a strange eclipse. Mentally and externally he had reverted to the old Satan Sanderson, of the brilliant flashing originality, of the curt risk and daring. The deeply human and sensitive side, that had developed during his divinity years, was in abeyance; it showed itself only in the affection he bestowed on the little nameless dog that followed him like a brown, shaggy shadow.
He was like that old self of his, and yet, if he had but known it, he was wonderfully like some one else, too—some one who had belonged to the long ago and garbled past that still eluded him; some one who had been a part also of the life of this very town, till a little over a month before, when he had left it with dread dogging his footsteps!
Curious coincidences had wrought together for this likeness. In the past weeks Harry had grown perceptibly thinner. A spare beard was now on his chin, and the fiery sun that had darkened his cheeks to sallow had lightened his brown hair a shade. The cut on his brow had healed to the semblance of a thin red birth-mark. Most of all, the renaissance of the old character had given his look, to the casual eye, a certain flare and jauntiness, which dissipation and license, unclogged now with memory or compunction, had matured and vitalized. His was now a replica of the face he had once seen, in that lost life of his, mirrored in his chapel study—his own face, with the trail of evil upon it, and yet weirdly like Hugh Stires'.
Fate—or God!—was doing strange things for Harry Sanderson!
Harry's game of cards in the freight-car had been a sequent of the game in the chapel. It was an instinctive effort of the newly-stirring consciousness to relink the broken chain, utilizing the mental formula which had been stamped deeply upon it when the curtain of oblivion descended—which had persisted, as the photograph of the dead retina shows the scene upon which the living eye last looked. The weeks that followed were reversionary. Rebellion against convention, dissipation—these had been the mask through which the odd temperament of Satan Sanderson had looked at life. This mask had fallen before a career of new meanings and motives. These blotted suddenly out with their inspirations and habits, and, the old spring touched, the mind had automatically resumed its old viewpoint.
He had studied himself with a sardonic, ex parte interest. He had found at his disposal a well-stocked mind, a copious vocabulary. Terms of science, historic references, the thousand and one allusions of the daily newspaper that the unlearned pass over, all had their significance for him. He was no superficial observer, and readily recognized the evidences of mental culture. But the cord that had bound all together into character had snapped. He was a ship without a rudder; a derelict, drifting with the avid winds of chance on the tide of fate. A thousand ways he had turned and turned. A thousand tricks he had tried to cajole the unwilling memory. All were vain. When he had awakened in the freight-car, many miles had lain between him and his vanished history, between him and St. James parish, the town he had impressed, the desolate white house in the aspens, the chapel service and surplice, and the swift and secret-keeping river. Between him and all that these things had meant, there lay a gulf of silence and blankness as wide as infinity itself.
But drifting, adventuring, blown by the gipsy wind of chance, learning the alphabet and the rule of three of "the road," the man was at once a part of it and apart from it. The side that rejoiced in the liberty and madcap adventure was overlaid by another darkling side whose fingers were ever feeling for the lost latch. In the nomad weeks of wind and sun, as the tissues of the brain grew slowly back to a state of normal action, the mind seized again and again upon the bitter question of his identity. It had obtruded into clicking leagues on steel-rails, into miles afoot by fruit-hung lanes, on white Pacific shell-roads under cedar branches, on busy highways. It had stalked into days of labor in hop-fields, work with hand and foot that brought dreamless sleep and generous wage; into nights of less savory experience in city purlieus, where a self-forgotten man gamed and drank, recklessly, audaciously, forbiddingly. Who was he? From what equation of life had he been eliminated? Had he loved anything or anybody? Had he a friend, any friend, in the world? At first it was not often that he cared; only occasionally some deep-rooted instinct would stir, subtly conscious, without actual contrast, of the missed and evaded. But he came to ask it no longer quizzically or sardonically, but gloomily and fiercely. And lacking answer, the man of no yesterdays had plunged on toward the ardent, alien to-morrow, and further into audacious folly. He had drunk deeper, the sign-posts of warning were set in his countenance, and his smile had grown as dangerous as a sunstroke.