King Spruce, A Novel

by Holman Day

And Wade went, tottering across the unmarked expanse of snow, the pure carpet nature had laid between him and the altar of his love—an altar within log walls, an altar whose fires were tended by—He pushed open the door! Foolish Abe was kneeling by the hearth of the rusty Franklin stove. And even as he had been toiling on Enchanted, so here he was whittling, whittling unceasingly, piling the heaps of shavings upon the fire—unconscious signaller of the hiding-place of Elva Barrett.

For a moment Wade stood holding by the sides of the door, staring into the gloom of the camp, for his eyes were as yet blinded by the glare of out-doors.

And then he saw her. Her white face was peering out of the dimness of a bunk. Plainly she had withdrawn herself there like some cowering creature, awaiting a fate she could not understand or anticipate. One could see that those eyes, wide-set and full of horror, had been strained on that uncouth, hairy creature at the hearth during long and dreadful suspense.

Through all that desperate search, in hunger, weariness, and despair, he had forgotten John Barrett, contemptuous millionaire; he remembered that John Barrett’s daughter Elva had confessed once that she returned his love, and he had thought that when they met again, this time outside the trammels of town and in the saner atmosphere of the big woods, she might understand him better—understand him well enough to know that John Barrett lied when he made honest love contemptible by his sneers about “fortune-seekers.” They were all very chaotic, his thoughts, to be sure, but he had believed that the ground on which they would meet would be that common level of honest, human hearts, where they could stand, eye to eye, hands clasping hands, and love frankly answering love.

But love that casts all to the winds, love that forgets tact, prudence, delicacy, love without premeditation or after-thought, is not the love that is ingrained in New England character. She gazed at him at first, not comprehending—her fears still blinding her—and he paused to murmur words of pity and reassurance.

And then Yankee prudence, given its opportunity to whisper, told him that to act the precipitate lover now would be to take advantage of her weakness, her helplessness, her gratitude. If he took this first chance to woo her, demanding, as it were, that she disobey her father’s commands, and putting a price on the service that he was rendering her, might her good sense not suggest that, after all, he was a sneak rather than a man?

They call the New England character of the old bed-rock sort hard and selfish. It is rather acute sensitiveness, timorous even to concealment.

And in the end Dwight Wade, faltering banal words of pity for her plight, went to her outwardly calm. And she, her soul still too full of the horror of her experience to let her heart speak what it felt, took his hands and came out upon the rough floor.

The shaggy giant squatting by the hearth bent meek and humid eyes on the young man. “Me do it—me do it as you told!” he protested. He patted his hand on the shavings. He was referring to the task to which Wade had set him on Enchanted. To the girl it sounded like the confession of an understanding between this unspeakable creature and her rescuer. Wade, eager only to soothe, protested guilelessly, when she shrank back, that the man was not the ogre he seemed, but a harmless, simple fellow whom he had been sheltering and feeding at his own camp. And then, by the way she stared at him, he realized the chance for a horrible suspicion.