“I will,” Crane answered.
XLIII.
The old bay horse that crawled back to Ringwood with Allis Porter after her interview with Crane must have thought that the millennium for driving horses had surely come. Even the ambition to urge the patriarch beyond his complacent, irritating dog trot was crushed out of her by the terrible new evidence the banker had brought in testimony against her lover.
“I didn't need this,” the girl moaned to herself. In her intensity of grief her thoughts became audible in expressed words. “Oh, God!” she pleaded to the fields that lay in the silent rapture of summer content, “strengthen me against all this falseness. You didn't do it, George—you couldn't—you couldn't! And Alan! my poor, weak brother; why can't you have courage and clear your friend?”
Her heart rose in angry rebellion against her brother, against Crane, against Providence, even against the man she loved. Why should he sacrifice both their lives, become an outcast himself to shield a boy, who in a moment of weakness had committed an act which might surely be forgiven if he would but admit his mistake? yes, it might even be called a mistake. The punishment accepted in heroic silence by Mortimer was out of all proportion to the wrong-doing. It meant the utter ruin of two lives. Firmly as she believed in his innocence, a conviction was forced upon her that unless Alan stood forth and boldly proclaimed the truth the accumulated guilt—proof would cloud Mortimer's name, perhaps until his death. Even after that his memory might linger as that of a thief.
The evening before Alan had been at Ringwood and Allis had made a final endeavor to get him to clear the other's name by confessing the truth to Crane. On her knees she had pleaded with her brother. The boy had fiercely disclaimed all complicity, protested his own innocence with vehemence, and denounced Mortimer as worse than a thief in having poisoned her mind against him.
In anger Alan had disclosed Mortimer's treachery—as he called it—and crime to their mother. Small wonder that Allis's hour of trial was a dark one. The courage that had enabled her to carry Lauzanne to victory was now tried a thousandfold more severely. It seemed all that was left her, just her courage and faith; they had stood out successfully against all denunciation of Lauzanne, and, with God's help, they would hold her true to the man she loved.
Even the pace of a snail lands him somewhere finally, and the unassailed Bay, with a premonition of supper hovering obscurely in his lazy mind, at last consented to arrive at Ringwood.
Allis crept to her father like a fearsome child avoiding goblins. Providentially he had not been initiated into the moral crusade against the iniquitous Mortimer, so the girl clung to him as a drowning person might to a plank of salvation. She longed to tell him everything—of her love for Mortimer, perhaps he had guessed it, for he spoke brave words often of the sturdy young man who had saved her from Diablo. Perhaps she would tell him if she felt her spirit giving way—it was cruel to stand quite alone—and beseech him, as he had faith in her, to believe in her lover.