“Sylvie had a fancy to come with me to the trading-station,” he said. “She came out after me and didn’t overtake me until just where the trail comes out into the road. We hurried back, but the storm caught us. It was pitch-black in the woods; we couldn’t keep the trail. We had to wait for daylight. I hope you weren’t too anxious about her, Hugh.—Bella”—he glanced over his shoulder—“could you make us some hot coffee and help Sylvie into some dry clothes? We are properly drenched, both of us.”
This speaker of terse, authoritative sentences was not the boy that had gone out that morning. That boy was gone forever.
Hugh stood up and looked slowly from Sylvie, who had stayed near the door and held her head up like a queen, to Pete.
“Where were you,” he asked gently—“where were you while it stormed?”
Pete moved toward the fire, holding out his hands. “Ugh!” he shivered, “I’m numb with cold.”
“Where were you,” Hugh repeated, “during the storm?”
Pete lifted his eyes slowly. They were bluer than the blue heart of a sapphire. “Under a pine-tree,” he answered casually enough, and then, just as Hugh would have smiled, the color creeping up into his lips, Pete’s young and honest blood poured over his forehead, engulfing him, blazing the truth across his face. Bella saw it and clenched her hands. Sylvie’s cheeks, too, caught fire. Hugh turned from him, blinded by terror, saw Sylvie’s trembling mouth in her dyed countenance, and turned back. He lifted the hand that had held, all this while, to the chair, and balled it into a fist.
“Don’t strike him,” said Sylvie quietly, not moving from her place by the door. “Don’t ever strike him again—Ham Rutherford!”
Hugh’s bones seemed to crumble; his knees bent; he leaned back against the chair, holding to it behind him with both hands. The gun clattered to the floor. In the silence Sylvie walked across the room and lifted her face. As if for the first time they saw her eyes, black and brilliant and young, sharpening the softness of her features. She looked at Hugh mercilessly, pitilessly.
“I’ve been able to see you for a long time now, Ham Rutherford,” she said. “And the instant I first saw you, I knew your name. Ever since the night you told me that story about the river, I’ve been watching you. You are a great and infamous liar! Yes, I know that you once killed a man for telling you that. Kill me if you like, for I am going to repeat it after him—a liar, hideous and deformed outside and in. I have no pity for a liar. Not even your physical misfortune shall shield you! You have made too great a mockery of it. You brought me here, blind, as helpless as one of the things you catch in your traps, and you played the hero with me. And you fed me with lies and lies and lies. I’ve eaten and drunk them until I’m sick. Now stand up and look at the truth. You are to eat that until you are sick.—No, Bella; no, Pete; I’m going to speak; no one can stop me. I know you love him. How you can look at him and see him as he is and know what he has done and still love him, I can’t understand. Now, Hugh Garth—the name you tried to make me love you by—I’ll tell these people that love you, some of the beautiful fables with which you tried to win my love. Maybe, then, they will begin to see you as you are. Here is the first: ‘There was once a very noble youth who had a friend—‘”