CHAPTER II
A MAN
Weary of fighting off thoughts, tired with the insistent intrusions of memory, John Stafford, who had awakened refreshed and himself again, leaned back in his seat and gave himself up to the bitter-sweet of the home-coming after long absence. Landing from the steamer in San Francisco, Stafford had still felt himself to be in a strange country, though the people proclaimed themselves Americans of the Americans in every look and turn and voice. But the blue sky and the blue bay, the mountains and the outdoor life of the people, gave Stafford still the feeling that he was yet in a foreign land, as he had been for five years or more.
He had not counted the time from the first six weeks after his departure from America.
Across mountains, deserts, prairies, plains and rolling hills with peopled cities in their sheltering folds, Stafford held his way toward the East. He hardly knew his destination. To New York, or to stop to the central whirlpool of life in America where goes most of what is from the West toward the outer edges of the roaring market place of the Indian name, built where the sluggish river flows, juggled by the hand of man out of the great inland Sea of Michigan into the Mississippi Valley, where it originally belonged. To one of the two cities he was indifferently bound.
Now, with eyes closed, and lips firmly and perhaps grimly set, Stafford looked the past in the face, and speculated as to the future. To him it was all undetermined. He could give it no continuous thought, for the past kept haunting him, as it had, more and more, with every mile on the way from the Pacific Coast.
His had been one of the tragedies of life and love. A strong man, upright, conscientious, brilliant and familiar with social risks, he had yet fallen in love with a married woman, the wife of a brute, an animal unsuited to her in every way, but still the wife.
It had been a love as wonderful as it was blameless. The two had met, and had involuntarily, by the mere force of a natural gravitation, been drawn toward each other, and, since they fitted, the inevitable had taken place. The very fibres of their souls had intertwined. It was the story, old as time, of love barred by the law which men have made for good, a story the material for which exists in all lands and among all races, in all climates and under all conditions, whether it be where gather the softest of the lazy mists which float beneath the palms of the Equator or as near the North Pole as the musk ox browses. The woman unrighteously married and the man unmarried—or the reverse—will come together. Like wire of gold through armorer's bronze, a perfect cloisonné, will come, sometimes, the close relationship. And, where is the fault of loving involuntarily, helplessly, but sinning not at all? Nature is God's and has her paths, and Love is but the index finger of the two.
But John Stafford and Mary Eversham were not of the sort to violate the conscience by yielding to fond desire. The right was first with this splendid man and woman. One sweet privilege they allowed themselves, that of a full confession to each other of all that was in their hearts, and then they separated, he to seek in Russia such forgetfulness as strenuous work might bring, she to bear patiently the weight of a barren life. Now he had fought his fight in the frigid Northern Orient, and had returned, a winning American, but objectless and restless.