THE 
 IDGE 
 
 M.L.C.PICK.THALL
 
 THE BRIDGE 
 
 UNIT. OF CALIF. LIBRARY. LOS AMr.KI.KX
 
 They staggered away into the night
 
 THE BRIDGE 
 
 A Story of the Great Lakes 
 
 BY 
 M. L. C. PICKTHALL 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE CENTURY CO. 
 
 1922
 
 Copyright, 1922, by 
 THE CENTUBY Co. 
 
 Copyright, 1921, by 
 THE RIOGWAT COMPANY 
 
 PRINTED IK U. 8. A.
 
 To MY COUSINS 
 J. M. AND R. F. M. 
 
 this book 
 
 which I am quite sure they will never read 
 
 is affectionately 
 
 dedicated 
 
 2132135
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGl 
 
 PART I THE SAND . . 1 
 
 PART II THE MIST . 93 
 
 PART III THE SNOW . . 193
 
 I 
 
 THE SAND
 
 THE BRIDGE 
 
 MACLEAR was done with it all at last. Not 
 another scrap of evidence to be destroyed, not 
 another fact to be hidden, not another damning half- 
 truth left to be told. Brant and Raynham were the 
 only men who suspected that the central borings 
 might have gone deeper; and they had worked for 
 him like slaves. Now he could rest with a quiet 
 mind till the inquiry began. The firm would come 
 out of it well. He had seen to that. 
 
 For ten days he had not been alone. In the soul's 
 craving for solitude he had forgotten the body's 
 craving for rest. His one desire was to reach his 
 office, shut the door, and think things out alone. Per- 
 haps if he could be alone the noise in his head would 
 stop. It had tormented him for a long time. It was 
 like the crash of falling girders or breaking steel. 
 
 He quickened his pace. Whatever had broken, it 
 was not his courage. Whatever had failed, it was 
 not his command of himself or of other men. But the 
 end was coming. He knew he could not last much
 
 4 THE BRIDGE 
 
 longer. And for common decency he must be alone 
 when he broke. 
 
 He was almost running when he turned in at the 
 entrance of his office building, hounded by a sudden 
 fear of screaming in the street. It was time he re- 
 laxed the intolerable strain. He could have beaten 
 the elevator man into insensibility for that one glance 
 that might have been curiosity or pity. For, after 
 all, the firm was safe. He would not think of the 
 rest, nor even admit it to himself. 
 
 He walked steadily enough down the corridor, and 
 stopped at the familiar door. He read the curved 
 black-and-gold letters of his name upon it, two or 
 three times, before he went in. Everything which 
 had belonged to his daily life held now this arrest- 
 ing quality of strangeness. 
 
 No one looked up as he crossed the outer office. 
 He was so nearly at the end of his endurance that he 
 was grateful they spared him that. He had his hand 
 on the door of his inner office when he saw that on 
 the threshold lay a single white violet. 
 
 Something, some vivid prescience of fear, told him 
 that Moira was here, and that he was to be spared 
 nothing. Nothing. 
 
 He opened that door also and went in, shutting it 
 behind him. 
 
 She was standing by the windows. She did not 
 move at first, and for a moment he wondered to see
 
 THE SAND 5 
 
 her all in black. Then he remembered that of course 
 she would be in black, for Gordon his brother. He 
 put his hands to his head. The crashing was grow- 
 ing very loud, hammers beating him down. 
 
 The room was very silent. It stood so high that 
 the noise of traffic in the street beneath troubled it no 
 more than the sound of a river troubles the stillness 
 of a forest. But there was no silence for Maclear. 
 
 He knew that to meet Moira he must be strong as 
 he had not been before. He must fail in nothing, 
 yield nothing, admit no crack in his armor of justi- 
 fication. For, after all, he had done no more than a 
 hundred other men. Why should he pay when a 
 hundred others, with less excuse, went free? He had 
 been betrayed by circumstance; luck had been bit- 
 terly against him. That was all. He must remem- 
 ber it. 
 
 In a moment he must speak. He must tell her that 
 the firm would be sure to come out of the investiga- 
 tion with an unblemished reputation, thanks to his 
 own energy. There had been nothing else in the 
 world to work for, these last days. He had worked 
 for it. Now there was nothing else left in the world 
 to say. But he could not say it. 
 
 Thoughts and words enough were in his mind, a 
 torrent, without cohesion. He bit them back. They 
 were nothing, after all, but business details, techni- 
 cal arguments with which, hour after hour, day after
 
 6 THE BRIDGE 
 
 day, he had confronted and refuted his own 
 They had served with men. They would not serv 
 with this woman. 
 
 She came slowly toward him. He saw nothm 
 but the knot of white flowers she wore, the one relie 
 in the unbroken black of her widowhood. He sa\ 
 that they were faded and dying, each petal rimmei 
 with brown. Seeing his gaze, her hand went up an< 
 touched them softly. 
 
 In a moment he must speak. And he had nothinj 
 to say. 
 
 "Gordon was bringing them to me." Her void 
 was level and quiet. "They found the little box ii 
 his hand, and thought I should like to have them 
 It 's as new as all that," she said, "as new as all that.' 
 
 She was near him. It was as if the silence of thi 
 room stood there with her, questioning the man fo: 
 whom it seemed there would never be silence an] 
 more. He had to raise his eyes at last from thi 
 flowers to his sister-in-law's face. 
 
 And in an instant the coverings of defense wer< 
 stripped from him. They withered like leaves in i 
 fire, leaving him with an intolerable consciousness o: 
 nakedness. There was no defense. 
 
 She knew. 
 
 After a long time, and as it seemed from a long 
 distance, he heard her voice again, saying, even witl 
 a solemn compassion, "Poor Cain!"
 
 THE SAND 7 
 
 He could not move his eyes from her face; he 
 could not stir. He felt life itself withdrawing from 
 his limbs, centering in one anguished point of re- 
 ceptivity. He had never known that grief came with 
 this stillness, or that it was like this to be judged. 
 
 "You have suffered very much. You can't have 
 saved more than a few thousands. Was it worth it?" 
 
 He tried to tell her that that was not the point 
 not the point that he was clean in intention that 
 life, fate, chance, had deliberately fouled his hands. 
 The thing was done every day. But he could not 
 speak. He put out his hands as if to shield himself. 
 But there was no shelter anywhere. 
 
 "There were three others besides him. But I can't 
 think of any one but Gordon. Not yet. God 
 would n't expect it yet. And then there 's me." 
 
 "Moira! You know I 'd die to give him back to 
 you?" 
 
 "I am sure of it, Alan. You loved him in your 
 way. You were always very good to us, to Gordon 
 and to me. I suppose that seemed so far apart from 
 your work, from what do you call it? Dodging a 
 specification? Men, I suppose, do these things " 
 
 Men do these things. Men, it seems, fall full- 
 length on the floor and catch the hem of a black 
 dress and hide their faces there. Well she looked 
 down on him without any change in the calm white 
 face above the dying white flowers; only, where
 
 8 THE BRIDGE 
 
 his dark hair touched her shoe, she drew her foot 
 away. 
 
 "It 's done sometimes, I suppose, and nothing hap- 
 pens. I don't know much about these things. But 
 if you 'd needed money, Alan, I 'd have lent you 
 some. I Ve plenty of that. And so gladly." 
 
 "Moira before God I reckoned everything 
 left a wide margin of .safety " 
 
 She listened carefully to the broken voice. She 
 said, "But the bridge fell." 
 
 Maclear wondered why he had wanted to be alone, 
 to think things out. Because no thought could ever 
 lighten the darkness of that accomplished fact. 
 There rose in him, with his despair, a hatred of life, 
 that had so betrayed him. 
 
 "I Ve tried I Ve prayed to be just to you, 
 Alan. He would have wished it. I have not quite 
 realized things yet. I have felt all along that I must 
 defend you, fight hard for you. And I have. Not 
 a doubt shall ever shadow you through me. But 
 it is going to be very hard. There 's something in 
 myself I can't defend you from. We loved you, 
 Gordon and I. We were so proud of you. He 
 thought the world of you. He said once, 'Alan 's 
 hard, but he 's true as steel.' Sometimes, when I 
 wake in the morning, I can't believe it yet; I can't 
 get things right in my mind. Will you give me the 
 truth now, yourself, without any evasion or excuse?
 
 THE SAND 9 
 
 It is almost the last thing you will ever do for me." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Behind everything, isn't it the fact that you 
 did n't run the foundations of the central spans deep 
 enough? I don't know the technicalities. But you 
 saved on the contract that way, did n't you? And it 
 seemed all right. Only, somehow, the sand got in, 
 and the river followed the sand. And the train went 
 through. Is this true?" 
 
 "Quite true." 
 
 "You do not ask me how I came to know." 
 
 Said the man at her feet: "I have fought, with 
 every bit of me, body and soul, to keep it a secret, 
 for the sake of the firm. I thought it was safe. But 
 perhaps one of those four rose from the dead to 
 teU you?" 
 
 She was weeping, not, he knew, for the dead; 
 but for him, for the living. "It was that poor boy 
 Oldershaw, your clerk, who hinted something, weeks 
 ago. He was boasting of you. He thought you so 
 clever. I stopped him. I never told Gordon." 
 
 "Did you come here to tell me this?" 
 
 "Yes. We believed in your honesty. I wanted it 
 from you once more. And something else. Alan 
 Gordon's brother, that he loved so dearly! I want 
 some day to be able to forgive you. I want so 
 terribly to be able to forgive you. But I can't do 
 it yet. Not yet. You are the nearest thing to Gor-
 
 10 THE BRIDGE 
 
 don that is left in the world. And yet there 's that 
 feeling for you, here, like hate. I dread that it 
 should come to that between us. But if I don't see 
 you for a long while, for years, perhaps some day, 
 when we are old and near the end of all this sorrow, 
 I '11 be able to meet you again in the way he would 
 wish me to, in the old way he would like." 
 
 "Forgive me?" 9 
 
 Again, from that solemn distance, her voice 
 reached him: "Did you know him so little as to think 
 he would n't forgive?" 
 
 For a little time thought and feeling were broken 
 in Maclear. He did not speak. He knew she was 
 going; that he might never see her again in this life; 
 and of all women in the world she, perhaps, had 
 been the most purely dear to him. But he had noth- 
 ing to say. 
 
 She had not yet gone. He thought she stooped 
 over him, thought she shrank from him ; her approach 
 and her repulsion would both, he knew, return in 
 memory and unbearable pain. But now he felt noth- 
 ing, though the touch of her divine pity was on him, 
 and the whisper of it: "Poor Alan! Poor Cain!" 
 Then the door shut softly. He was alone, as he had 
 desired to be. 
 
 He stayed there on the floor a long time. 
 
 Once or twice some one knocked softly. He did 
 not hear nor answer. It was late when at last he
 
 THE SAND 11 
 
 dragged himself to his feet. It seemed very dark. 
 The sun was behind the tall buildings on the other 
 side of the street, and their shadow darkened his 
 room. Everything was silent. The staff had gone 
 home. After hesitating a moment, Maclear found 
 his hat and went out too. 
 
 He went down the stairs, eight flights, but he 
 seemed to be immediately in the street. Space was 
 opaque to him, the distance lost in mist; he saw men 
 as trees walking. The crashing in his brain never 
 stopped. It confused and benumbed him, seeming 
 one with the mist. Only the passing of late news- 
 boys now and then rent these shadows with intoler- 
 able clearnesses as they ran by shouting: "Bersimis 
 Bridge Disaster. Full Details. Who Was to 
 Blame? Inquiry Promised." He walked on. 
 
 He had at first no thought of where he was going. 
 He was looking for some place of refuge from the 
 memory and the knowledge that went with him every- 
 where, that clung inseparably to his soul like a re- 
 volting deformity to the body. Moira's dreadful 
 pity had branded him with a sin he yet strove to deny; 
 for in mind and will he had been innocent. Innocent. 
 He felt that if he could not find such a place of for- 
 getfulness, he would go mad. Until he found it he 
 must go on walking till his flesh wore out like a pair 
 of shoes. 
 
 He walked on, walked on. The electric street
 
 12 THE BRIDGE 
 
 lamps added their stars to the blue-purple dusk. He 
 left the business quarter of the town, and wandered 
 by older streets, tree-grown; the leaves covered the 
 wooden sidewalks with a diaper of intensest still 
 shadow. All these ways were familiar to him. He 
 had been born in this city, had grown with its great 
 growth. It was like walking back into his own life. 
 In that building he had held his first job; in that 
 house set back from the road, where two maples 
 heaved mounds of motionless darkness against the 
 dim stars, they had lived for two years, that he 
 might be near the technical school. In that larger 
 house with the concrete steps his father had died. 
 Round the corner, in a house with a funny tower, 
 Gordon had had diphtheria. On another street had 
 lived a family at whose home he and Gordon had 
 spent many hours, and there Gordon had met Moira, 
 and Maclear had been half in love with her himself. 
 And here 
 
 Maclear stopped. This was the shuttered house 
 where she and Gordon had lived. 
 
 He turned and went away. He wondered why 
 his feet had led him here. Everywhere he went there 
 was some thought of Gordon, some picture of Gordon, 
 his ugly sweet face under its reddish thatch smil- 
 ing from the night. Maclear began to talk with 
 him, as, in the back of his brain, he had talked for 
 days and days:
 
 THE SAND 13 
 
 "You know. I didn't mean it?" 
 
 "I know." 
 
 "You know I 'd have died to save you, any day, 
 Gordy?" 
 
 Maclear waited with trembling insistence for the 
 answer. The imagined face seemed to look upon 
 him pitifully, too; he could not endure it. 
 
 "You know, wherever you. are, I 'd have died to 
 save you?" 
 
 "I know. I Jve died to save you." 
 
 Was it "I've died," or "I'd have died"? Question- 
 ing the shadow of his own thought, Maclear did not 
 know. He went on. 
 
 The white light and black shadow of the summer 
 night submerged him for hours. He did not know 
 where he went. He walked in a mist, from which 
 occasional sudden things, minute and unimportant, 
 emerged to arrest him: heat-dried grass, wet with 
 dew, sending up a sweet breath; the odd pattern of 
 an iron gate; a shrub covered with pink tubular 
 flowers, rigid as metal in the glare of the street lamp. 
 Sometimes he moved with such effort he felt his 
 legs heavy as stone. Again, he felt himself so thin 
 and light he wondered when people stepped aside 
 to avoid him. All the time he questioned, all the 
 time waited for the answer. 
 
 "You know I did n't mean it, Gordon? You know 
 I 'm not to blame?"
 
 14 THE BRIDGE 
 
 The visionary face of his brother returned its com- 
 passion. 
 
 "You know I 'd have died for you, Gordon?" 
 
 "I know." The night itself seemed to reply. 
 
 Maclear walked on. 
 
 He found himself drinking at a brightly lighted 
 bar. Other men were there, looking at him cu- 
 riously. He heard one genial soul say to another: 
 "Yes, thas him! Thas Maclear! Cleverest man in 
 the trade, they say, an' the best-lookin' feller, an* 
 the luckiest. And his luck has n't gone back on him 
 yet! You see. There '11 be nothing proved against 
 the firm Poor devil!" 
 
 Maclear paid for his drinks and went on. 
 
 That sickness and horrible distaste of life, the 
 tangled, betraying thing that made a man foul him- 
 self whether he would or no, shook him from head to 
 foot like a physical nausea. He walked now in 
 streets that are never quite empty, the oldest streets 
 of that city down by the waterfront. He walked in 
 the gutters among the hand-carts and oil-flares, the 
 cries and smells and clamors of a foreign popula- 
 tion. He shuddered from the dark bright faces that 
 the night gave him. That girl with the scarf over 
 her head and her teeth flashing; that slim boy pushing 
 home the peanut-stand; that Madonna-faced woman 
 calling her children; even the children themselves, 
 picking up half -burnt moths under a light, he saw
 
 THE SAND 15 
 
 them all only as so many potential murders, adul- 
 teries, betrayals, helpless in the hold of life. 
 
 He went on, under the dusty branches of old 
 chestnut-trees which roofed the stir and strife away 
 from the stars. He went on through dark alleys of 
 old warehouses. The smells of Italian cooking 
 yielded to the scent of raw hemlock planks and 
 overripe fruit. He came to the high gleam and 
 shadow of grain-elevators, towering in the night; to 
 houses that were half afloat, boats that were half on 
 land. It was a silent place. The noises of the for- 
 eign quarter had fallen away behind. Pausing to 
 listen intenfly, he could hear a slow sigh; it was the 
 wash of lake water among hundreds of piles. The 
 sound was soft as sleep. It was all about him as 
 he went on and on to the end of a long wharf, where 
 a single lantern confronted an infinity of shadows 
 and of stars. 
 
 Maclear knew this place, also. 
 
 There was a shed on the end of the wharf. Mac- 
 lear leaned against it. He spread his arms out to 
 steady himself from the recurrent shock and crash of 
 the falling steel which he had never for a moment 
 ceased to hear. He stood very still. The lantern 
 swung softly in a cloud of flower-winged moths. Its 
 light showed him tall and black upon the silvery 
 weathered wall, as if some one had marked the shed 
 with a great dark cross.
 
 16 THE BRIDGE 
 
 He leaned farther out. He could hear the warm 
 air fingering in the funnel stays of a moored tug. 
 He could not fairly see the surface of the water; only 
 the lantern's golden reflection flickering in invisi- 
 bility. 
 
 He knew now why he had come here. 
 
 Hollow beyond hollow of forgetfulness, the stars 
 wavered beneath him. They sank perpetually in 
 night, but never vanished there. This was the place 
 where memory ceased. 
 
 He thought, as he plunged, that the stars rushed up 
 to meet him. Then his body struck the water, and 
 their images went out in a hundred hastening ripple- 
 rings. 
 
 He sank deep. For a moment the cool shock 
 quickened him. He was a good swimmer, and he 
 fought grimly enough, there in the shadow, against 
 the body's instinctive response. He rose, and there 
 reeled upon his vision the black overhang of the 
 wharf, the soaring elevators behind it, the light and 
 shadow of the city upon a heaven as tender as a 
 dark pearl. He shut his eyes to it and sank again. 
 
 He had no need to fight any more. His strength 
 went, and it was a half-dead thing the mild water 
 drew down. The noise in his head turned to a blaze 
 of bursting fires, and that to a silence almost com- 
 plete. When he rose the third time, they were but 
 dying eyes he turned on the night.
 
 THE SAND 17 
 
 Then he cried out. He would have struggled, but 
 the warm thick water lay on him like a weight. His 
 head went back. He was all but gone. He reached 
 out dying hands to life. He felt himself sinking 
 again. He had forgotten how to swim, he could not 
 save himself. A black tide, which he saw almost 
 with his bodily eyes, was rushing down on him, wash- 
 ing out everything. 
 
 Everything but the bridge. 
 
 He saw the bridge more clearly than he had ever 
 seen it, the bridge, and all connected with it, com- 
 pressed in space and time to one instantaneous appre- 
 hension. It spanned that on-coming darkness; little 
 brilliant lines and diagrams enclosed it, economical 
 calculations printed indelibly on the universe. It 
 was at the same time gigantic and minute, swift and 
 motionless, dazzling and obscure. He had no longer 
 any assurance of escape. He could not lose it. 
 Even beyond life, perhaps, he would not forget. 
 
 The wharf was the last fringe of life, the fence 
 of the unfathomable. He looked, with vain and 
 awful appeal. He saw a black body poised upon 
 the edge of things, rushing down upon him in a clean 
 dive. Then again the star-images were wrecked and 
 broken, and the ripples sped along the hollow under 
 side of the wharf. 
 
 He knew nothing else until he knew life return- 
 ing, with sufficient wrenches and agonies. He was
 
 18 THE BRIDGE 
 
 glad of life. He was lying on the wharf, his head 
 on a man's knees. He put out a hand, touching the 
 sun-splintered wood on which he lay. It came to 
 him that it was wonderful to be capable of such an 
 action. Hands were busy about him, he heard hard 
 breathing and smelt dirty wet cloth. A voice said, 
 "You 're better now?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "If I let you up, you won't try any of them games 
 again?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 He was released by the hands that partly sup- 
 ported, partly imprisoned him. But he was too weak 
 to stand alone. In that hour he was stripped of 
 everything, even of the desire for death. He was 
 helpless as one of the half-burnt moths he had 
 watched the Italian children pick up under the lamp. 
 He turned on his face and broke into racking sobs. 
 
 He was lower than shame. When he had finished 
 his weeping he sat up and swept the tears from his 
 eyes. The other man's arm was about him, support- 
 ing him even with a suggestion of tenderness. Mac- 
 lear looked into a face grayed with strain, gleaming 
 with wet so that it shone like snake skin; common and 
 pinched, it was yet anxiously human. He asked, 
 "How did you get me out?" 
 
 "I 'd a job. You 're a bigger man than me. 
 But times like this a feller 's stronger than ordinary.
 
 THE SAND 19 
 
 And there was a ladder at the side there, by the 
 slip." 
 
 "How did you happen to see me?" 
 
 "I thought you was drunk," said the man, frankly. 
 "I was follerin' you to see what was in your pockets 
 when you fell! But I ain't touched a thing. You 
 k'n feel and see. Say, why did you do it?" 
 
 "There was (something something I wanted to 
 forget." 
 
 "Well you ain't goin' to try it again that way?" 
 
 "No. It's not sure enough. Not sure here." 
 Maclear held out a roll of sodden bills. "Take 
 them," he said; "they'll dry." 
 
 The man hesitated. Then Maclear saw the blood 
 stain his face. "Not now," he answered awkwardly. 
 "It don't seem right." 
 
 Maclear dragged himself to his feet and stood 
 swaying. Answering his rescuer's look, he said: 
 "You need not worry about me any more. I won't 
 try that way again. It's not certain, after all. I 
 know something better." 
 
 He started to walk back the length of the wharf. 
 The planks under his feet swung in monstrous circles 
 of light and shade, as the moths flew round the lan- 
 tern. He staggered. The man watching him hesi- 
 tated, then swore and followed, thrusting an arm 
 roughly within his own. "Here," he said, "you ain't 
 fit to go alone, wherever it is."
 
 20 THE BRIDGE 
 
 They stumbled down the wharf, Maclear and the 
 thief, a black shadow inextricably locked. They 
 crossed railway lines gleaming in the dew, and crept 
 the length of a string of freight-cars on a siding. 
 Another wharf opened before them between dim 
 water lanes. Freight-sheds were on one hand, ships 
 lying along on the other. An arched sign bore the 
 words, "MACLEAR & Co." 
 
 The big steel freighters from the upper lakes were 
 in, Misstassini, Mirimichi, Meductic, sea-going 
 ships all. Maclear passed them. He was not 
 thinking of them. He knew at last where he would 
 go, and what he would find. 
 
 Then again the way opened. And there before 
 them at the end of things was lying a silver ship. 
 
 She lay in the full glare of an arc-light swinging 
 from a high pole. The light painted her silver to 
 her mastheads, beautiful on the face of the night, an 
 old lake schooner loading stone. 
 
 "The Marline Messier" said Maclear. "She was 
 to have been broken up soon." 
 
 He could not have explained why he had recol- 
 lected the old ship, nor what affinity had drawn him 
 to her; perhaps it lay in that one word "broken." 
 
 They wiere alongside, looking down on a deck 
 silvered with the dust of stone. Maclear said, 
 "Shout." After a moment the man beside him 
 hailed doubtfully. He hailed again. Some one
 
 THE SAND 21 
 
 came from shadow into the white light, and looked up 
 at them. 
 
 "Garroch," said Maclear. 
 
 "Sir! Mr. Maclear!" 
 
 Amazement and something of horror sharpened 
 the old voice. Maclear said quickly he felt he 
 must be quick "Who 's on board with you?" 
 
 "Levett, and my nephew from the Townships." 
 
 "Enough to raise sail. Is there any wind out- 
 side?" 
 
 "Some, I doubt, but " 
 
 "Rouse them up. You could tow out to it in the 
 dinghy. Never mind the cargo. I can't wait, 
 Garroch. I must go must go " 
 
 He put his hands to his head. "I must go," he 
 said, "anywhere where I sha'n't hear the bridge, 
 Garroch! Anywhere where I can forget!" 
 
 The old man had his foot on the bulwark and 
 cleared the jump to the wharf like a boy. But it 
 was in the other man's arms that Maclear lay, broken 
 at last, like his bridge. 
 
 ir 
 
 Very slowly, through a still evening, the Marline 
 Messier was standing in to shore. 
 
 They had left behind them the lake highways. 
 They had moved for days in a ring of solitude whose
 
 22 THE BRIDGE 
 
 blue was seldom broken by the stain of smoke or the 
 gleam of a sail. Throughout the day the land they 
 neared had grown almost imperceptibly upon their 
 horizon. Long and low, it had seemed now of the 
 substance of cloud or water, now only of shadow or 
 light. 
 
 The wind which so softly drifted the old schooner 
 onward was not strong enough to ruffle the surface 
 of the water. As the sun sank, the great lake turned 
 luminous, lost all bounds, became another roseate 
 heaven. Between these clarities the ship hung, black 
 as grief, moving to a shore drawn in sudden black 
 along the lessening gold. 
 
 Then the sun dipped. Again the schooner was 
 gray as a gull in the twilight of the North. The is- 
 land ahead was again a shadow. As they neared the 
 land that shadow breathed on them a full sweet scent 
 of flowers. 
 
 When they came to anchor, the twilight still held. 
 Maclear said, "Put me ashore here." 
 
 They hauled in the dinghy towing astern. Mac- 
 lear lowered himself into it. Garroch followed 
 him and took the oars. They pulled toward the 
 land. 
 
 Presently, with no more than a sigh, the boat 
 took the beach. Maclear stepped from it and 
 walked slowly along the sand. He saw nothing else. 
 Under his feet, the dust of silence, deadening their
 
 THE SAND 23 
 
 fall, was nothing but sand; white sand, but stained 
 here and there, where the iron lay, as if with blood. 
 He stooped and touched it. The surface was cold, 
 but beneath it lingered warmth. He sifted it aim- 
 lessly in his hands, lifting and letting fall a thousand 
 grains, minute chips of quartz, rounded dust of red 
 and yellow sandstone, powdered ores, sparkles of 
 granite old as the world. 
 
 He had no thought at all except that it was pleas- 
 ant to handle the soft, innumerable monotony. He 
 wandered on. 
 
 Inland were low dunes crested with grass, ground 
 willows, and thin poplars. Between him and the 
 dunes stretched a ribbon of marsh, mooned all along 
 with the moth-blurred disks of the evening primroses. 
 It was from here the sweetness had come. 
 
 He knew if he walked the island's length he 
 would probably find nothing but more sand, willows, 
 poplars, the flower and fragrance of the little 
 marshes. No more silent place could have been 
 imagined, nor one more remote. 
 
 He went slowly back to Garroch, and said: "This 
 is the place. I '11 stay here. You know what to 
 do." 
 
 Garroch put back to the schooner, leaving Maclear 
 on the beach. 
 
 Far into the night the twilight held. When the 
 dinghy returned, loaded with supplies and camping-
 
 24 THE BRIDGE 
 
 stuff which Maclear had bought at a port on the 
 way up the lakes, the men found him asleep, with 
 his cheek to the sand. They were used to it; he had 
 slept a great deal, in a sick way, aboard the schooner. 
 Even when they raised a small tent, and spread 
 blankets, and lifted and laid him there, he did not 
 wake. 
 
 These things done, they returned on board. 
 
 They had their orders. Garroch carried a letter to 
 Raynham, giving him full authority in the business, 
 telling him enough. Maclear wanted no letters for- 
 warded. He wished to be consulted in nothing. 
 He wanted to lapse out of life for a little while. 
 Raynham would understand. It would be conven- 
 ient to tell other acquaintances that he was threatened 
 with a nervous breakdown, and had gone camping. 
 That would do. In two months the Marline Messier 
 would return for him. 
 
 Toward midnight a breeze sprang up. They 
 worked the schooner out. Her ancient dove-gray 
 topsails, dwindling under the stars, were Maclear's 
 last link with former things. He had broken with all 
 that had been his life. 
 
 He slept on. The island was voiceless all night, 
 and his sleep held neither voice nor dream. 
 
 Silent was the coming of the dawn. 
 
 When Maclear woke, his solitude was as complete 
 as if he had been reborn into an empty world.
 
 THE SAND 25 
 
 m 
 
 Morning after morning rose supremely from the 
 hazed sea-line, drowned the world in golden heats, 
 and passed in winged red cirrus, or towering cumu- 
 lus marching the long horizons. Never had there 
 been such peace, or such fair weather. The lake- 
 bosom breathed, no more. It was the beginning of a 
 world, when the Word was only, Let there be light; 
 and there was light, and a great stillness. 
 
 Maclear shared in this stillness. 
 
 In all his life he had experienced neither leisure 
 nor physical loneliness. Now these two things laid 
 their hands on him; and he thought he would be 
 healed. 
 
 He felt that his only help was in himself, in his 
 own power of forgetfulness, or, rather, in his ability 
 to detach himself from the past. He compared him- 
 self to a man maimed in some accident, yet denying 
 his disability, going on in spile of it, the stronger 
 for seeing clearly the bitter possibilities of life. He 
 could not entirely break down that bridge of memory 
 that linked him to previous things; but he could re- 
 fuse to travel by it. Maclear's mind was strangely 
 calm, lonely, clean-swept. Deliberately he drew 
 into it a thousand tiny details; building them con- 
 sciously into a shelter; loving more and more to
 
 26 THE BRIDGE 
 
 turn and consider them, as he sifted the sand in his 
 hands. 
 
 He built himself a fireplace; and it pleased him to 
 choose each stone for it with curious care, to trace 
 the veins of blackish sparkling ore, the minute fos- 
 sils, the embedded crystals of the rock. Those he 
 did not like he threw away. 
 
 The muskrat trails at the edge of the marsh would 
 hold him for hours, puzzling out their manifold inter- 
 sections. A little wader with lemon-yellow legs, 
 picking water-snails from the sunken reed roots, gave 
 him food for infinite reflection. A turtle with a wet 
 wine-red shell, creeping from a pond to lay her eggs 
 in a channel of the warm mud, he watched a whole 
 evening. These small lovelinesses were new to him. 
 He took them, shaped them to his need, as sometimes 
 he shaped the wet sand to idle stars or walls or 
 flowers. 
 
 As he trained his mind, so he trained his body. 
 He swam, walked, lay in the sun, all with the 
 thought of so increasing his power of resistance to 
 the past. As he was proud of his ability to dwell on 
 the little existences of the marsh and the lake, so 
 he was proud of every slightest physical sensation of 
 rest or enjoyment, and overlooked no one of them. 
 The pleasure of the cold sand under his bare feet 
 as he stepped from his tent in the morning; the thrill 
 when his body passed from the warm surface water
 
 THE SAND 27 
 
 to the depth that never loses its icy cold; his delight 
 in the scent of the wax-white spiral orchises then be- 
 ginning to blossom along the marshes, all these he 
 counted and credited to himself, proofs of his own 
 strength. 
 
 Yet it was the sand that most charmed his busy 
 idleness. 
 
 He never tired of it. It took on an immaterial 
 meaning for him as he dwelt on its material com- 
 plexity. It was like life. It resembled the countless 
 small deeds and occurrences that go to make up life; 
 some clear as diamond, some dark as blood, yet all 
 alike building one huge indifferent fabric. Of it- 
 self the sand had no volition. Outer forces alone 
 moved it, the waves changed it, the wind blew it 
 where it listed. It was so with all that men did ; they 
 had no power of themselves to alter their circum- 
 stances; they were governed irresistibly, as the sand 
 was governed by the wind. They were blameless. 
 Good and evil in life were no more than the colors 
 of the eternal sand. 
 
 As his bodily strength was renewed, Maclear felt 
 a supreme inner mastery of himself. He was with- 
 out fear, without haste. He counted time only by 
 the slow advances, the slow recessions, of nature. 
 He filled his days in this way. His nights were ab- 
 solute blanks of quiet and dreamless sleep. After 
 he had been on the island for two weeks, if any
 
 28 THE BRIDGE 
 
 one had asked him, he would have said that . he 
 had forgotten about the bridge, in the sense in which 
 he intended to forget. 
 
 He thought that his weakness, back there in the 
 city, had been bodily. Now, hardening from head 
 to heel, he dreaded himself no more. 
 
 Only once was his security shaken; and by a very 
 little thing. 
 
 He was diving from his favorite rock ledge into 
 deep water. The lake was immeasurably calm. He 
 passed down, down without effort, seeing the world 
 change from gold to blue, from blue to green. His 
 fingers touched the sand at the bottom, stirred it into 
 a smoke; closed on something hard. A school of 
 little fish flickered past. He turned and flashed up- 
 ward, shot with a deep breath and a glitter of brief 
 foam into the sun. Climbing on the rocks again, he 
 looked at the hard thing he had taken from the sand. 
 
 It was a pen-knife, massed with rust. 
 
 Suddenly, as he looked at it, an extraordinary ter- 
 ror and dismay shook him. It was as if the old 
 knife possessed a destroying atmosphere, or as if it 
 were poisoned. Sheer physical dread darkened the 
 sun for him, his throat closed, he gasped for breath. 
 The terror endured five seconds, perhaps; passed, 
 leaving him shaking on the hot rocks, wet with more 
 than water. 
 
 Memory supplied the trivial link, but could not
 
 THE SAND 29 
 
 explain it. Maclear had owned such a knife, nearly 
 thirty years before; and Gordon had wanted it. 
 They had quarreled over it tremendously, as they 
 did about once in a twelvemonth; and in a sudden 
 red-hot rage Maclear had stabbed Gordon in the hand 
 with it. He had forgotten the incident for years, 
 though at the time he had been hard hit by the sight 
 of the red trickle over Gordon's dirty young hand. 
 Now, the sickness and passion of that long-past hap- 
 pening of his childhood was suddenly renewed for 
 him with the force of his manhood. It was as if he 
 had just struck his brother with the rusty knife across 
 his palm. That remembered blood was fresh. 
 Trembling, Maclear flung the knife into deep water. 
 That night, for the first time, he woke, the old cry 
 on his lips, in his heart: "You know I 'd have died 
 for you, Gordon?" 
 
 "I know." 
 
 "Not my fault, not my fault. My hands are clean. 
 Brother, brother, I 'd die to bring you back, now!" 
 
 Silence, and the whisper of the lake along the dark 
 beaches, and the large stars standing low toward the 
 austere dawn. Maclear turned and slept, but there 
 were tears on his face. 
 
 The morning came, calm and beautiful. He was 
 strong. The shadow passed, and he returned to his 
 former security. 
 
 Later, a small fishing-tug with three men aboard
 
 30 THE BRIDGE 
 
 put in to the island. The men landed, and Maclear 
 went and spoke to them. They were pleasant fel- 
 lows. They said they only wanted to stretch their 
 legs ashore. They looked at Maclear admiringly, 
 at his slender, steel-like strength, at his tanned clean- 
 shaven face, at his crisped dark hair and hard blue 
 eyes. They said: "You look as if you were havin' 
 a pretty good time here by yourself." 
 
 Maclear smiled and said, "Yes." 
 
 "There 's times," said one, genially, "when a 
 feller 's got to be by himself." 
 
 "What do you mean by that?" 
 
 Maclear was startled by the quick low voice that 
 had come from his own lips. The genial man was 
 startled, too. He said vaguely: "Why, nothin', 
 just that!" and looked rather timidly at Maclear, 
 who, for an incredible instant, had reminded him of 
 a gun ready to go off. Then some one else spoke. 
 The instant was gone. 
 
 They walked about the beach, and Maclear showed 
 them the sands, how far they stretched, how level, 
 how hard they were. He liked his visitors, but was 
 a little contemptuous of them. In his mental detach- 
 ment, he considered them one by one, the man with 
 the long chin, the genial fat one with the black mus- 
 tache, and the thin one in waders. He thought: "If 
 what has happened to me had happened to one of 
 them, he would n't have got over it so easily."
 
 THE SAND 31 
 
 Going, they asked him, "Anything we can do for 
 you?" 
 
 "No, thanks," said Maclear; "I have everything I 
 want." 
 
 He was glad when they went, yet he spent a long 
 time going over every incident of their visit. Sup- 
 pose he had told them who he was; suppose he had 
 said : "I 'm Maclear, who was responsible for the 
 Bersimis bridge," how would they have looked at 
 him then? He considered these imaginary looks, 
 in character with the long chin, the black mustache, 
 and the waders. It was the gentle-faced man in 
 waders that troubled him most. 
 
 Day after day the motionless bright weather held, 
 and his clear days and blank nights with it. 
 
 Then bands of cirrus rose in the sky. The water 
 grew milky under them, iridescent as if oil had been 
 spilled. At long intervals an undulation heaved the 
 surface, and broke on the beaches with a sullen, un- 
 expected thunder. It left a rope of green weed, 
 gray shells, little fish, and drowned butterflies, mile 
 after mile, along those tideless shores. Drying, this 
 drift smelt of desolation. 
 
 At night, for the first time, Maclear could see no 
 stars. He slept restlessly. Waking in a dull gray 
 dawn, he knew for the first time that he had dreamed. 
 
 He was uneasy. The trouble impending on the 
 lake seemed reflected in his own spirit. An obscu-
 
 32 THE BRIDGE 
 
 rity was drawn between him and nature. He saw the 
 mewing gulls, the dark coween arrowing down the 
 lake, the bronze fish-hawk sailing inshore, as though 
 through mist. He knew this obscurity was in the 
 air; yet felt it on the hard clarity of his own mind. 
 
 While he swam, dressed, and cooked his breakfast 
 he was vexed by a persistent wonder as to what he 
 had dreamed. 
 
 Later, he wandered down the beach, aimlessly fol- 
 lowing the rope of drift. He was a little surprised to 
 see a double line of his own footprints on the other 
 side of the rope, since he could not remember walk- 
 ing here before. The weed and dead things breathed 
 on him the barren smell of those great deeps of un- 
 salted sea. This, and the footprints, and the coming 
 storm, and the dream he could not recall were all 
 one in his mind. 
 
 Something was leaking and stirring feebly be- 
 neath his strength, as the sand had leaked and trick- 
 led beneath the spans of the Bersimis. 
 
 Then, in a curve of the drifted rubbish, he stopped 
 suddenly. 
 
 The drift here framed in its curve a slightly in- 
 clined plane of the purest and most stainless sand. 
 To this plane the footprints on the other side of the 
 rope led; here they ceased. And on this sand was 
 drawn, minutely to scale, a large plan of the Bersi- 
 mis bridge.
 
 THE SAND 33 
 
 The memory of the draftsman had not failed him, 
 nor had his hand for an instant faltered. 
 
 Sand, lake, and sky danced a moment in blots 
 and rings of crimson, and went out. Maclear saw 
 nothing but his bridge. 
 
 He stood looking at it. 
 
 Presently he put his hand into his pocket and drew 
 out a flattened carpenter's pencil which he had hap- 
 pened to have with him; touching the lead unsteadily, 
 he found that it gritted with sand. 
 
 This was what he had used, then, when memory 
 drove him out, even in his sleep, to draw his bridge 
 on the hard sand of the island. He wondered how 
 many times he had done it before ; what other beaches 
 or dune slopes or hidden places there were which 
 might at any time remorselessly confront him with 
 the handiwork of his sleep. 
 
 He moved to stamp the thing out; to blot it away. 
 But there was no need. As he watched, a smoke 
 drove across it; it faded in a moment. It was the 
 sand drifting before a sudden wind. 
 
 Maclear turned and walked inland, where the pop- 
 lar thickets shook a dark-and-silver dazzle of leaves, 
 and the ridges of the dunes trailed into mist. He 
 had lost all thought. He forgot his camp. He had 
 no sense nor aim of direction. He was afraid, for 
 even in himself there was no security. 
 
 After the first, the wind did not come in gusts. It
 
 34 THE BRIDGE 
 
 came like a wall, an immense advance out of space. 
 The storm was of wind only. It lifted the sand as 
 if with hands. The air was full of driving sand, 
 a level, scorching, impalpable fog. It was as though 
 the whole island would be spun and carded away, 
 scattered on the wind, strewn on the lake. 
 
 Like the sand, Maclear went on, driven before that 
 wind. 
 
 Soon he heard a rising thunder added to the other 
 voices. It was the thunder and incessant crash of 
 the great lake, hurled in breaker upon breaker along 
 the beaches behind him. He thought it was the crash 
 and thunder of a falling bridge. 
 
 The earth itself seemed to rise against him, to 
 cast him out in this storm of smallest particles that 
 clogged his feet, choked his breath, scourged, 
 blinded, and perpetually escaped him. The ground 
 was elusive as water. The lashing willow scrub on 
 the flanks of the dunes came away in the hand, the 
 poplars slipped from the hold, the world was a 
 fluid, pouring away into space. There was no firm 
 standing anywhere. 
 
 The island was riddled with channels of angry 
 foam. Spume whitened the still lagoons, the inlets 
 frothed among the marsh meadows and the fringed 
 gentian beds. Maclear passed from land to water, 
 from water to land, without knowing. But most ter- 
 rible of all was the running of the sand.
 
 THE SAND 35 
 
 All day he was a fugitive before it. 
 
 With the evening, light broke for a moment 
 through the dry racing clouds; light of colorless bril- 
 liance, fierce as steel. The wind held the grass rigid 
 as iron. The blowing dunes showed like clouds, 
 transparent in the wild gleam. Maclear came to 
 another beach; he had crossed the island. 
 
 On this beach a woman stood, blown about with 
 foam, gazing toward the coming night. The gleam 
 clothed her in its own heatless fire. She seemed a 
 bright beckoning flame in the flux of existence. To 
 her Maclear went. He struggled for reasonable, 
 commonplace words ; but his need spoke for him. 
 
 "Hold me," said Maclear, "hold me fast" 
 
 He knew that she turned and looked at him. He 
 saw her face, strange and beautiful between bands of 
 spray-sleeked hair. She did not speak. But divine 
 communication was surely in the gesture with which 
 she stretched her hands and drew him toward her. 
 He rested at last at her side. Her arm was about 
 him. She held him fast against all his storms. 
 
 He had no thought at all but that it was good to 
 rest so, near the beating of her heart. 
 
 He looked into her face. The light made it 
 golden, wonderful. Simply as a child he asked her, 
 "Who are you?" 
 
 "I am Sombra." 
 
 The gleam died.
 
 36 THE BRIDGE 
 
 IV 
 
 "Where are you?" 
 
 "I am here, holding you." 
 
 "It 's dead dark. I can't see you. But I can 
 feel your arms. Don't let me go." 
 
 "I won't let you go." 
 
 "Are these your hands, brushing the sand from 
 my face?" 
 
 "Yes. You fainted or something like. I could n't 
 lift you, so I stayed with you. If I 'd gone for help, 
 I 'd never have found you again. The sand would 
 have buried you." 
 
 "Don't leave me to the sand." 
 
 "Trust me," said the voice from the night. "I 
 won't leave you." 
 
 Again, after a time, Maclear asked, "Where are 
 you?" 
 
 "Here." 
 
 The voice came more faintly. He thought it was 
 receding into the wind. He put up his hand and 
 touched the chill curve of a cheek. He could see 
 nothing at all, but he felt that it was wet, as though 
 with tears. 
 
 "Why are you crying?" 
 
 "Oh, what am I to do! How am I to save you? 
 The sand and the wind are makin' me weak. I can't 
 even keep your face from the drift no more!"
 
 THE SAND 37 
 
 She was speaking with her face close to his, that 
 he might hear. He said, struggling to be free of 
 the weariness that lay on him like the weight of the 
 sand, "Is there anywhere to go, away from this?" 
 
 "Yes, yes! If you could move, if you could 
 walk" 
 
 He fought to his knees, to his feet. In the pitch- 
 dark he sought for her hands, found and held them. 
 They sustained him. He said, "Come." 
 
 The voice out of the wind cried faintly: "I can't 
 till you help me. The sand 's over me like a grave." 
 
 He mastered his lassitude of flesh and soul, 
 stooped, freed her garments of the iron-heavy drift, 
 drew her erect beside him. Clinging together, they 
 staggered away into the night. 
 
 Maclear thought of nothing but that the place 
 where she had held him, where he had rested in her 
 arms, was even now lost and blotted out; that he 
 would never be able to find it nor return to it. 
 By and by he heard her asking, "Can you hear any- 
 thing?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 Again she asked him, "Can you hear a sound?" 
 
 "What sound?" 
 
 "A sound as if the wind was blowing in a great 
 empty shell?" 
 
 "I think so." 
 
 They went on. Presently she said: "Yes, I hear
 
 38 THE BRIDGE 
 
 it. It 's the wind in Morning House, and that 's my 
 home. We '11 be safe now." 
 
 In time they reached a flight of steps, half -buried 
 in sand. Before him, in the night, Maclear was 
 aware of a greater darkness, stretching immeasur- 
 ably, and made visible only by a single thread of 
 light, a thin finger of whirling sand. He heard, too, 
 a low continuous sound of the utmost desolation; the 
 sound of the wind crying in a wilderness of empty 
 rooms. 
 
 Then the pressure of the wind-storm suddenly re- 
 leased him. The girl had led him through a door. 
 
 They went down a long dim passage, so still after 
 the night outside that he heard the sand whispering 
 between its double row of closed doors. One door 
 was open, showing light within; and to this room she 
 led him. 
 
 To Maclear there was an exquisite homeliness in 
 the room with its wooden walls, black stove, yellow 
 wooden chairs, and table with a worn blue cloth. A 
 lamp with a yellow shade stood on the table, and its 
 circle of light painted vividly upon shadow the dark 
 face of a boy who sat there, and who looked up as 
 they entered, crying, "Sombra!" 
 
 At the cry, an old man. came from the shade be- 
 yond the lamplight. He was so tall his head was 
 in shadow. Shavings clung like flakes of light to 
 his worn blue sleeves as he rested his great hands on
 
 THE SAND 39 
 
 the table, saying softly, "Who 's that breathing there 
 beside ye?" 
 
 "A man I brought in from the storm." 
 
 The girl's voice came faintly. No one else spoke 
 or moved for a minute. Then the old man began to 
 advance softly round the table, feeling his way. All 
 was so suddenly still Maclear could hear the faint 
 rasp of his knotted fingers passing over the cloth. 
 He knew then that this old man was blind. 
 
 The blind face came into the circle of light. Then 
 Maclear would have cried out. For there was death 
 in that face; death in that outstretched groping hand; 
 death and indestructible hate in the soul that drove 
 the great aged body down upon him with the slow 
 inevitable motion of shadow or cloud. And he 
 could not cry nor move. 
 
 His senses shrank and dwindled to an aching point, 
 a single apprehension, focused on that advancing 
 hand. 
 
 All happened in silence. Since the girl's reply, 
 no one of them had spoken. And now it was in 
 apathetic silence that the tall boy who had been sit- 
 ting at the table came and set himself in the old 
 man's path. There was something horrible to see 
 in the way the searching hand closed on him. Mac- 
 lear saw him gripped, shaken, dragged from the 
 room, cast out; and could not stir. If they had 
 shouted or spoken he would have moved; but the
 
 40 THE BRIDGE 
 
 silence bound him as with ropes. And the boy suf- 
 fered passively as a log, without one gesture of re- 
 sistance or any change in his dark and secret face. 
 
 He thought, when the boy had been cast out, that 
 the old man came back quietly, and fell to work 
 again in his dim corner. But he was not sure. 
 
 Later, he thought he heard some one weeping be- 
 side him. But he was not sure of that either, be- 
 cause of the ceaseless running of the sand on the 
 roof over his head. 
 
 Mait Ransome sat at work on the veranda of Morn- 
 ing House. 
 
 The veranda was a hundred feet long. Floored 
 with wood, the boards were everywhere thrust aside 
 by willow bushes which had grown up from the 
 hollow beneath; others had rotted away. Every 
 board was scoured to the grain by the action of the 
 sand that heaped the whole length of it in drifts like 
 snow-drifts. The wooden roof had fallen, too, in 
 many places, and at each seam let in the blue of 
 heaven or the rain. 
 
 Behind the old man were ten boarded-up win- 
 dows, flat and featureless; then a plain door; then 
 another ten windows. Above the veranda roof a
 
 THE SAND 41 
 
 row of twenty-one windows took the light on their re- 
 maining panes of glass. These upper windows were 
 not protected, and the floors of some of the rooms 
 behind them sagged with the weight of the blown 
 sand. 
 
 At the back of the house the details of the front 
 were exactly repeated. 
 
 Over both the front and the "back doors, a wooden 
 sign from which the paint had long been blistered 
 still bore a shadow of the words, "Morning House. 
 M. Ransome, Proprietor." 
 
 Long ago, in the prosperous times of Port Tallis, 
 the place had been built for a summer hotel. 
 
 But before any guests had come to Morning House 
 the curse of the sand had fallen on Port Tallis. 
 Some of the slow uncharted lake currents shifted ; the 
 harbor silted up in a year or two; ships called there 
 no more, people began to leave the little frame houses 
 among the moving hills of sand. By and by the 
 lighthouse was removed, leaving nothing but its 
 round concrete foundation out in the shallows for 
 the gulls to fish from. Only Mait Ransome was left, 
 living on in his empty hotel, and hearing year by 
 year the advance-guard of the sand whispering in 
 his hollow rooms. 
 
 Morning House had known but two guests. The 
 second of the two was Alan Maclear.
 
 42 THE BRIDGE 
 
 He came out of the door into the young light that 
 turned the dewy sand all gold, and said, "Good 
 morning," to Mail Ransome. 
 
 "It is a good mornin'. I k'n feel it." The 
 giant turned his face to the broken roof, and a ribbon 
 of sun striped his blunted features like a scar. He 
 resembled one of the trees hidden on the beach; like 
 them, he seemed worn by ceasejess attrition rather 
 than by age. While he talked his huge hands worked 
 with wonderful delicacy, turning a piece of wood 
 against the chisel. Only this deftness betrayed his 
 blindness. Moment by moment a shaving clear as 
 honey fell on the pile at his feet. He went on: 
 "There 's been plenty of fine weather since you come. 
 Your stay with us, sir, has been fort'nate." 
 
 His voice was soft and slow, seeming to possess 
 some delicate quality akin to the skill of his hands. 
 Maclear wondered, as he had wondered many a time, 
 if those hands had indeed been outstretched against 
 him. He asked, "Do you know how long I Ve been 
 here?" 
 
 "I ain't kep' account, sir. I leave it to Sombra." 
 
 "It is nearly a month ago that my camp was 
 washed away, and she brought me here. Nearly a 
 month," repeated Maclear, watching the ceaseless 
 curl and fall of the fine shavings. 
 
 "It 's not many gent'men would be content in such
 
 THE SAND 43 
 
 a poor place as this. And you've only been over 
 to town with the boy once since you come." 
 
 "I have been very happy here," answered Mac- 
 lear, gently. As if this thought led naturally to the 
 next, he asked, "Where 's Sombra?" 
 
 "Down to the lagoon, sailin' the boats." 
 
 Maclear went down to the lagoon. 
 
 It was a way he had trodden many times since he 
 came to Port Tallis in the storm. 
 
 It was a golden way; the light on the dancing pop- 
 lar leaves was gold, the dunes were gold with their 
 dews. Here and there boards thrust from them, 
 splayed fences, tilted wooden walks, as well as the 
 blanched roots of trees. This was little Port Tallis, 
 taken by the sand. Through this sun-sweetened des- 
 olation, growing daily more dear and more familiar, 
 Maclear went down to the lagoon. 
 
 Sombra was standing barefooted in the shallow 
 blue water, sailing a toy boat. Half a score others 
 lay pn the sand, waiting their turn. For to this 
 Mait Ransome's strength had come. He made toy 
 boats for the stores in the town, and Sombra tested 
 them. 
 
 She stooped earnestly above the little craft she 
 sailed; the ends of her two black plaits whipped the 
 water. The boat was lateen-rigged and painted scar- 
 let. Presently it faltered in its fairy course and
 
 44 THE BRIDGE 
 
 swamped among the bur-reed on the bank. Maclear 
 said, "Sombra." 
 
 She did not smile as she turned her head and saw 
 him. But behind her dark beauty a glow dawned 
 like the glow of the sky. 
 
 She was tall and of a noble strength, and young, 
 not more than eighteen. Her black braids framed 
 an oval face, tanned almost to the color of gold. 
 Her mouth was rather large, but it had the hue and 
 the texture of certain dark roses. Her brows were 
 very black, and had the languid arch of the sickle, 
 so rarely seen, and the eyes under them were splen- 
 did. She lifted the boat, waded ashore, and showed 
 it to Maclear. She said seriously, "It don't sail 
 right." 
 
 "What 's the matter with it, Sombra?" 
 
 "The mast hasn't enough rake forward, I think. 
 It must be fixed before Sal takes it across. The 
 others will be all right. Lugs and schooners 
 they 're easy; they rake aft." 
 
 Smiling, he told her, "What a lot you know, Som- 
 bra!" 
 
 She looked at him gravely. "Since you come, it 
 don't seem to me I know anything." 
 
 "Do you know that I Ve been here nearly a month? 
 And that I 've never thanked you for letting me 
 stay?" 
 
 "There was no need. There 's rooms enough,
 
 THE SAND 45 
 
 forty and more, not countin' the downstairs. Why 
 should n't you come to us when your camp was 
 washed away? We're the only folk left on the is- 
 land. Why should n't you stay if you 're content 
 with the poor stuff we k'n give you?" Suddenly 
 there were tears in her eyes. "I 'd give you better if 
 I could," she said. 
 
 More than her strength or her beauty, this humil- 
 ity in her moved him. Another man might have 
 taken her in his arms, told her his heart. But Mac- 
 lear was hard. The time was not yet ripe to him; he 
 yet doubted, delayed. He knew that if he could 
 love any woman in the world, this girl was she. He 
 knew that love was advancing on him like the ad- 
 vance of seasons, the coming-on of years: as irre- 
 sistibly. But he would neither question its kind nor 
 hurry its advent. Enough at present to see her, to 
 know her near. Sometimes not speaking to her 
 much, nor even looking at her ; but allowing her pres- 
 ence to absorb every channel of his sense and his life, 
 so that there should be no room for any other guest. 
 
 He answered gently: "There could be nothing bet- 
 ter for me than what you give, what you have given." 
 He thought of what yet she might give, and the blood 
 flushed his face. "That night when I first came to. 
 you, and said, 'Hold me,' and you held me in your 
 arms " 
 
 They looked gravely at each other. Hitherto that
 
 46 THE BRIDGE 
 
 night had not been spoken of between them; now at 
 the appointed time it came to light, to words. Those 
 words seemed to weave them together with invisible 
 strands. Maclear had known it would be so. He 
 was content to leave the unfolding of his passion to 
 those influences of the place to which he had utterly 
 surrendered himself. 
 
 "That night, Sombra, I came to you in great trou- 
 ble." 
 
 "I knew." 
 
 "You gave me the only rest I have known from it." 
 
 "All trouble 's the better for somethin' to hold to. 
 Comfort just comes to that, a hand held out. 
 When the trouble's bad, don't matter whose it is." 
 
 "Mine was bad trouble." 
 
 "I knew that, too." 
 
 "So bad that I 'd even tried to lose it in death, as 
 well as that death of the whole nature of man that is 
 in perfect solitude." 
 
 She watched him, wondering. 
 
 "It was no use, no use at all." Maclear for the 
 moment had forgotten her, he spoke low and pas- 
 sionately. "I realize now that I '11 never forget 
 it, never get over it, that way. Such a trouble, such 
 a memory must have full power over a heart and a 
 mind empty. But if that heart, that life, were so 
 full of better things that there was no room for the 
 trouble and the memory "
 
 THE SAND 47 
 
 He broke off abruptly. His need again tad 
 spoken for him, said more, perhaps, than he had in- 
 tended to say. But as he looked at her, his eyes 
 burned with a flame that lighted a grave, innocent 
 light in her own. He asked, in a quick, rough voice: 
 "Sombra, if you had known, that night I came to 
 you in the storm, that I 'd done something very bad, 
 very dreadful, would you still have held me ,in 
 your arms?" 
 
 He waited without stirring for her answer, his 
 blue eyes intent. It came slowly: "If you're to 
 help, if you 're to give comfort, it don't do to think 
 of more than the givin', or maybe the chance '11 go. 
 The want of it 's all. The givin' 's all. The rest 
 don't matter." She looked away. He saw her lips 
 tremble. "I never thought of things like this till 
 you come." 
 
 He was trembling a little when he said, still with 
 that fierce earnestness: "Sombra, I'd done nothing 
 bad, nothing with a bad intent." 
 
 She turned her face to him again. She was 
 faintly smiling. 
 
 "What I did had a terrible result. Life turned 
 against me. It was like using a tool, and having it 
 slip, and cut your hand. Yes, like that. I did it. 
 But I'm not guilty of that result." 
 
 He had been speaking to something that was not 
 Sombra. When she said softly, "I believe you,"
 
 48 THE BRIDGE 
 
 he remembered her. His eyes rested on her. The 
 storm died out of him. He said, a little unsteadily: 
 "You hold me. Sombra, what were you doing on 
 the beach that night?" 
 
 "Often I go to that beach in a storm. I think, 
 Suppose another ship was to come ashore there, and 
 no light, and no one by." 
 
 "Another ship?" 
 
 She was silent a moment, then said slowly: "My 
 father's was wrecked there in a spring blow, comin* 
 up from carryin' fruit in the Gulf, 'to take on the 
 excursion trade on the lakes at the openin' of navi- 
 gation. A few years back you could still see some 
 of it, out there on the ledge. But it was an iron 
 ship. There 's nothing left now." 
 
 He said nothing. In his presence she had always 
 been reticent; a little shy, a little proud; he had never 
 questioned her, though the household at the ruinous 
 hotel had given him enough cause for curiosity. He 
 had been content to wait for knowledge, too ; sure that 
 the impersonal powers to which he had made over 
 his own will would in their time unfold it. 
 
 "The boat struck there on the shoal. Nothin' 
 come ashore but my father and some pulped oranges. 
 The beach was yellow with them for miles. The 
 hotel was nearly finished then, and my mother she 
 was first-cousin to Mait was helpin' him run it.
 
 THE SAND 49 
 
 They took my father there. He was sick a long time. 
 He could n't work nor talk much English, but he 
 could sing so you could hear him 'way out on the 
 fishin'-ground. At the end of the summer my 
 mother was married to him. At the end of that 
 winter he died. 
 
 "Next fall, Sal and me was born. We 're twins. 
 But mother did n't live long after. I 've thought of 
 them two so much so much! Seems as if I knew 
 why she died." Her voice sank to a breath. "He 
 come like the sun. He went like the sun. It was too 
 cold for her to live without him. 
 
 "He 's buried in a little graveyard back among the 
 sand-hills. One day I '11 show you. It ain't been 
 used for years. His stone 's the only one standin' 
 now. 'J. M. Luz,' it has on it, 'beloved husband of 
 Martha Ransome, aged twenty-eight years. His ban- 
 ner over me was love.' I 've heard she had terr'ble 
 trouble to get that tex' on the stone. They said it 
 was n't in the Bible. But it was. That was the last 
 thing she minded about. Theirs was a short day/' 
 
 "But a summer one." 
 
 She looked at him softly. "Thank you. You 
 always put things right for me." 
 
 "Then your name is not Ransome?" 
 
 "No. This was my father's name." She stooped 
 and wrote slowly on the sand, "Juan-Maddalena Luz."
 
 50 THE BRIDGE 
 
 She went on; "My name's Sombra Luz. Sal's is 
 Salvator Luz. But we 're mostly called Ransome." 
 
 "Strange names, Sombra, for Tallis Island." 
 
 She said simply, "Father, he wanted Mother to use 
 one or the other, not thinkin' she 'd have a call for 
 both." 
 
 He watched her as she stooped again and passed 
 her hand over the writing in the sand. Even so, he 
 thought, had death blotted out the owner of the name, 
 that man of the South who had come up from fruit- 
 loading along the Floridas, been wrecked on Tallis 
 Island, and died after setting up his banner over the 
 heart of Martha Ransome. What currents, he won- 
 dered, of snow and sun, shadow and fire, might be 
 mingled in this girl whose name was both shadow 
 and light? 
 
 Sombra went on, with a timid kind of pride that 
 escaped him: "Mail's real well educated. And Sal 
 and me have had schoolin'. There was a school kep' 
 on here for a long while, and we-'ve studied a little 
 since." His thought burned on his lips: 
 
 "Sombra, how beautiful you are!" 
 
 She glowed to greater beauty as he said it. 
 
 And, of a sudden, he was sure of her; her soft 
 surrendered eyes told him that he had only to ask, 
 and she would give, greatly. He guessed that, for 
 all her reticence, the genius for giving was hers, as 
 the genius for art or for work might be another's.
 
 THE SAND 51 
 
 But he had not yet the assurance of due time; of 
 himself he was not yet quite sure. The instinct for 
 possession was strong in him. So also was the in- 
 stinct of mastery. He would not possess at all until 
 he could possess utterly. 
 
 He stretched out his hand gently, lifted and held 
 one of her long black braids still sparkling with 
 water. It lay across his open palm. But it seemed 
 to her that she had not strength enough to free her 
 hair; to him, that he had not strength enough to let 
 it go. 
 
 "I have never forgotten that first day at Morning 
 House, Sombra. Do you remember? I came down 
 from the room in which you and Sal had put me, 
 not knowing what I should find. And I found you 
 standing at the kitchen door. The blue lake was 
 behind you, and the foam, and the sun on the sand, 
 and the poplar trees. You held a sand-swallow in 
 your hands. As I watched, it flashed away, a little 
 dark streak into the light; and then you turned, and 
 smiled, and saw me. You told me that the swallow 
 had been blown into the hall over-night, and that 
 you 'd kept it in your work-box near the stove, and 
 now that it was well it had gone. And I said, 'Then 
 there 's more than one hurt thing you Ve sheltered 
 from the storm.' Later, I talked to Mait. And 
 when I spoke to you, you said, 'Stay.' Perhaps you 
 meant this hurt thing to stay too till it was well M
 
 52 THE BRIDGE 
 
 She did not answer except with the pure compassion 
 of her eyes. 
 
 "I should like to see real diamonds in your hair, 
 Sombra. Not these water diamonds. I should like 
 to dress you in silk the color of the deep water out 
 there beyond the shoal; or in honey-gold, the color 
 of that little rose you have in your garden; or all in 
 white" 
 
 His voice sank. She was pale, glancing down tim- 
 idly at her bare brown feet, her shabby skirt, the 
 cheap cotton blouse that strained against the swell 
 of the breast. She seemed very mean in her own 
 sight. 
 
 "You are like a golden rose. And you Ve been 
 growing here in the sand for years.'" 
 
 He was held by the miracle of her mere physical 
 bloom and perfection in such a place. But she an- 
 swered his last words: 
 
 "Yes. I Ve been here all my life. When my 
 mother died Mail took us, for he was her nearest 
 kin, and the Ransomes always hold together, for 
 pride. But " 
 
 For a moment a shadow, a reflection like the re- 
 flection of fear from some other face, darkened hers. 
 Maclear's silence yet questioned her. Lifting her 
 eyes, she said in a low voice: "But he hates us. 
 Don't ask me how I know. I know. We remind 
 him. He loved my mother before my father came.
 
 THE SAND 53 
 
 Don't ask me how I know that, either. I kfiow. 
 And he hated my father. And he hates us. 
 
 "He hates Sal more 'n me feelin' my father more 
 in him. He 's been terr 'ble hard on Sal. Often- 
 times it 's been in my heart to quit, for Sal's sake. 
 But, after all, he 's kep' us, and worked to do it. 
 I could n't quit him, not altogether. And Sal won't 
 quit me. 
 
 "When he 'd his sight, 't was n't so bad, though 
 often he 'd fall into such a rage he 'd go crazy, and 
 seem 'most ready to kill Sal. But as he grew old, 
 and his sight failed, and his stren'th, he come to 
 think of nothin' else but what was past. His mind 
 ain't just right, for all he 's so quiet and so clever 
 with the little boats. Whenever there 's a storm, 
 Mait goes back in his mind to the one when my 
 father's boat was wrecked. He looks to see the men 
 carry my father in, and my mother go to him and 
 take his head on her knees. Perhaps Mait does see 
 it, in the dark. That night, when I brought you in, 
 he thought you was my father, come back from the 
 storm." 
 
 "Then it was to save me your brother put himself 
 in Mail's way?" 
 
 She smiled tremulously, though there were tears 
 in her eyes: "We always have to do that when 
 the storm 's real heavy. It seems then as if Mait 'd 
 have no rest, go quite mad, unless he could get at my
 
 54 THE BRIDGE 
 
 father to turn him out! So Sal goes and gets in his 
 way, and he puts Sal out, and quiets down. Sal, he 
 just goes in at the back door again." Once more her 
 eyes darkened, her brown hands went with passion to 
 her heart. "But sometimes oh, sometimes, Mr. 
 Maclear, I 'm afraid! I 'm afraid of Sal. It looks, 
 sometimes, as if Mait was standin' in front of a glass 
 he could n't see into when he stands in front of Sal, 
 and as if that glass was givin' him back his own 
 crazy hate from my brother's face. Then then I 'm 
 afraid. I see nothin' but grief." 
 
 Maclear was silent. Then he laughed. He lifted 
 the black hair that lay across his hand, and kissed it, 
 in defiance of the passions and sorrows of past years, 
 of hearts long blown with the sand. 
 
 "What 's all that," he said roughly, "to the life 
 that 's in one strand of this? And what 's life but 
 love, Sombra?" 
 
 For a moment the world was so still he heard the 
 beating of his own heart, the mewing of the gulls a 
 mile away, the soft, innumerable sound of the dunes, 
 never quite at rest. But the time was not yet. He 
 pressed the plait again to his lips, dropped it, and 
 for that day let her go. 
 
 But that evening, when they sat together in the 
 lamp-lit kitchen, and he watched the dark of her hair 
 in the shadow, and her hands like gold as she sewed,
 
 THE SAND 55 
 
 the sense of her presence became something too 
 poignant to be borne. He went then and paced the 
 glimmering island beaches, that night of late summer, 
 towering into stars, no more than a sufficient roof 
 for Sombra and his love. 
 
 VI 
 
 "There 's a run of herrin' in the shoal water. 
 I 'm go in' to spear some from the ledge. Will you 
 like to come?" 
 
 The voice was Salvator's. Maclear paused a 
 minute in astonishment; the boy had hitherto been 
 so unapproachable, so watchfully wild; then he said, 
 "Yes, thanks, 1 11 come." 
 
 He had been going to bed in the sandy room set 
 apart for him, and furnished by Sombra from her 
 own, and Sal's, and Mail's, with much eager shame 
 and anxiety of heart. He slipped on his coat again 
 and opened the door. Sal was waiting for him in 
 the half -ruined hall, lighted only by a young moon 
 now setting. 
 
 If Sal's words had been friendly, his face so like 
 Sombra's and all but as beautiful held no more 
 than its usual look of dumb and secret resistance. 
 Maclear was a little chilled. Time after time he had 
 stretched out hands of affection toward that alien,
 
 56 THE BRIDGE 
 
 reserved spirit, which had, time after time, eluded 
 him; so that he had been left holding nothing, as 
 though he had grasped at sand. 
 
 Time after time the lad's likeness to Sombra had 
 pulled at his heart and he had tried again. 
 
 Sal, seeing him now, said nothing but "Come." 
 He turned down the passage, and Maclear followed 
 him. They kept close to the wall with its row of 
 closed and rotting doors, for the flooring in the center 
 was unsafe; and Maclear felt that wall and doors 
 were alike coated with a scum of sand. 
 
 Outside, Sal gave him his fish-spear which was 
 no more than a large steel fork bound to a stick 
 and a bundle of frayed willow roots tied together and 
 dipped in oil or tar to form a torch. They went 
 down to the beach together. By the ledge of rock, 
 crested with sand, which here thrust out from shore 
 as straight as a groin, Sal stopped. Maclear took 
 off his shoes while Sal lighted the smoky torches. 
 
 In the low moonlight Tallis Island lay like stilled 
 waves of shadow and silver. Not a leaf moved. 
 Peewits cried sadly from the inner marshes. The 
 lake was a rippleless cloth of silver, running for 
 miles, whispering at the rim. Under the lee of the 
 ledge, where the herring had shoaled, it flashed per- 
 petually, a brighter flickering silver of the sides of 
 leaping fish. Maclear and Sal, each carrying a spear 
 and a torch, waded out along the narrow ledge.
 
 THE SAND 57 
 
 Maclear was held there, less by the sport if such 
 it could be called than by the beauty of the night 
 and the desire to establish some sort of comradeship 
 with Sal. By and by he gave up spearing on his own 
 account and watched Sal. 
 
 The boy stood almost motionless in the shallows, 
 torch lowered to the water and sending along its 
 bright surface a trail of smoke and a gleam of red 
 flame, in which the sides of the turning fish shone 
 red also. His attitude, as he waited with his prim- 
 Stive spear poised, seemed to Maclear singularly 
 and wildly graceful; and he saw that the motion of 
 the spear, when it fell, was too swift to follow with 
 the eye, and that each time it rose, another herring 
 was added to the twitching heap in the basket Sal 
 had brought with him. Maclear was fascinated a 
 little by the spitting redness of the flame, the accu- 
 rate descent of the spear. He said, when the basket 
 was full and the boy rejoined him on the sand, 
 "You 've speared about three times as many as I 
 have." 
 
 The dark eyes so like, so unlike, Sombra's 
 rested on him indifferently. Sal only asked, "Will 
 we go back now?" 
 
 "The night 's too fine to leave. Shall we have a 
 swim?" 
 
 "All right." 
 
 "I '11 race you to that rock out there."
 
 58 THE BRIDGE 
 
 Sal did not answer. Where the ledge joined the 
 beach he thrust the two torches into the sand. 
 They sent up a blur of reddened smoke upon the 
 pearly night. 
 
 Beyond the torches, out on the ledge, Sal and Mac- 
 lear slipped off their clothes. Maclear saw on the 
 boy's body old bruises; he knew some of them had 
 been taken on that night when he first went to Morn- 
 ing House, and Sal had set himself in the way of 
 Mail RansomeJs groping hands. He was moved. 
 For a moment he reached after an inner meaning, in 
 Ithe apparent! fatt, that escaped him. Then they 
 dived together. And he forgot everything in the 
 foreseen delight of the cool water racing along his 
 limbs. 
 
 He felt without words a brief, exquisite sense of 
 his own union with nature, and again with life. He 
 was in communication with the night and the stars. 
 Love was awaking in him those delicate perceptions 
 which hardly belong to the realm of the flesh. His 
 strength was at full head in him. He laughed; he 
 could Jiave sung aloud with pleasure in his own 
 vigor. He felt himself flashing effortless through 
 that silver calm. He paused an instant and glanced 
 back for Salvator. 
 
 He had been sure the boy would be behind him. 
 But the black head and the bruised olive shoulder 
 flashing like glass in the moon were beside him.
 
 THE SAND 59 
 
 A queer sense of danger came to Maclear. He 
 felt he must outstrip Sal in the race to the rock. 
 He swam as he never had swum before. But the 
 black head was always at his side. And at the last 
 the boy dived beneath Maclear, came up on his other 
 side, and touched the rock before him. 
 
 The action was almost insolent. Maclear touched 
 the rock too, turned, and swam back. He could 
 not keep up with Sal. When he came to the ledge 
 the boy was standing on it, glittering in the moon- 
 light, and stooping to give Maclear a hand out. 
 
 Maclear said, pulling on his trousers: "I thought 
 I could swim. But I wonder how many yards you 
 could give me in a quarter-mile!" 
 
 Again the obscure dark eyes rested on him in- 
 differently. Sal answered, "It 's all I k'n do, 
 swim." 
 
 "You do that well." 
 
 "It 's not much. There 's other things I 'd like to 
 be able to do. But I 've never had a chance at 
 learnin' 'em." Suddenly he turned on Maclear, with 
 a movement so quick it was almost threatening. He 
 asked, "K'n you wrestle?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And box?" 
 
 "I used to box a great deal at one time." 
 
 There was an odd silence. Then Salvator drew 
 a sharp breath. His lean, tanned chest lifted as
 
 60 THE BRIDGE 
 
 though he sobbed. The blood ran to his dark cheeks, 
 his eyes glowed, softly eager. He seemed in that 
 instant to come alive, as though before he had been 
 dead. 
 
 Maclear watched. The likeness to Sombra almost 
 hurt him. He asked, smiling at this young eager- 
 ness, "Would you like me to show you how?" 
 
 "You you would you show me?" 
 
 Maclear laughed aloud. "Now, if you like. 
 The moon gives us light enough, and the sand makes 
 soft falling." 
 
 The coat he had taken up to put on, he laid back 
 on the rocks. Sal's dark eyes burned on him. 
 There was no sound but the cry of the peewits. He 
 nodded, and the boy advanced, his hands awkwardly 
 raised. 
 
 "Mr. Maclear!" 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 "Let 's have it this way," the intent, secret gaze 
 never left Maclear's face "You see them torches?" 
 
 Behind them, at the end of the ledge, the two 
 torches yet flared smokily, like spots of anger on 
 the silver purity of the night. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Let 's have it like this: You try to pass them 
 torches ; I '11 try to stop you." 
 
 "All right." 
 
 They began. For a time there was no sound but
 
 THE SAND 61 
 
 the light motion of their feet in the sand, Maclear's 
 curt directions, and the wail of the unseen birds. 
 
 Then Maclear said, "You must n't let me hit you 
 so much." 
 
 Sal had fallen back. He listened with his old 
 guarded look. He said, "I was waitin'." 
 
 "What for?" 
 
 "My chance of gettin' in a real blow. I 'm used 
 to bein' hit." 
 
 "Well, you wait too long. Come." 
 
 Sal advanced again. He asked, "Are you any 
 nearer them torches?" 
 
 After a moment Maclear said: "No. I am not." 
 
 Sal did not speak. They began again. 
 
 The boy attempted no defense, save that he clum- 
 sily shielded his head. He simply barred Maclear's 
 way with his body, and suffered the blows mutely. 
 Maclear wearied of this opposing inertia, this soft, 
 dumb resistance. It was like fighting the sand. 
 Something the hour; the silence; the boy's strange 
 apathy, which seemed yet to conceal something for- 
 midable touched his nerves. He dropped his 
 guard a moment, without thought; saw, simulta- 
 neously, the dull face flame to sudden white life; then 
 came the blow. 
 
 It was so savage, so fierce, that it might have been 
 fatal had it come from a man quite full-grown. It 
 seemed that only the ferocity of a devil could have
 
 62 THE BRIDGE 
 
 driven it across a space of ten inches so hard to the 
 point of Maclear's chin. As it was, his knees gave 
 and he went down. He was up again almost in- 
 stantly, sick and numbed, his good-will outraged. 
 For neither recklessness nor ignorance could excuse 
 the quality of that blow. 
 
 He would not trust himself to speak. He picked 
 up his coat and turned toward the beach where the 
 stumps of the torches smoked. He lifted his hand 
 to send Sal out of the way, into the water, for all 
 he cared, for a cooling. Though all the time he 
 knew that the heat was his own, that Sal was cold and 
 watchful; and the knowledge added to his bewilder- 
 ment. He took three steps; and Sal slipped under 
 his raised arm and closed. 
 
 They swayed a moment and went down together. 
 
 Whatever incomprehensible purpose lay behind all 
 this, and Maclear was assured of a purpose, he 
 did not want to hurt this lad, so piercingly like Som- 
 bra. But his temper was rising. He was fighting 
 it more than he was fighting Sal. 
 
 They strained on the ledge, half in the water, in 
 dead silence. The attack had been so unexpected 
 that Maclear was underneath. He saw Sal's face 
 above him, eager, yet infinitely removed; absorbed 
 in some secret preoccupation. Then he put out his 
 strength, turned, and rose, trying to break free. But 
 Sal rose with him, clinging stubbornly. Again Mac-
 
 THE SAND 63 
 
 lear loosened that hold. But it closed on him else- 
 where, ineffectual yet inescapable. He broke away 
 at last, and, as the boy staggered, slipped forward 
 a foot and tripped him. Sal caught at Maclear's 
 arms and pulled him down, too. They twisted again 
 in the sand, close-locked. Maclear felt a faint 
 shock of uneasiness, almost of fear. One would 
 have thought they were fighting for life, the boy was 
 so persistent, so insensible, so relentless. His mind 
 went again to the sand, to the clinging, choking, 
 yielding, unyielding sand. 
 
 He said through his teeth: "I warn you. When 
 my chance comes, I shall hit you without mercy!" 
 
 There was no reply. The tense struggle did not 
 relax. Sal's look was still informed with purpose; 
 still, in some way not to be explained, remote. Mac- 
 lear knew he must end it. With an effort he broke 
 free, sprang back, and, as the boy plunged blindly 
 forward to clinch again, he struck without mercy, as 
 he had promised. 
 
 Sal tossed his arms, spun half round, and dropped 
 on the sand. 
 
 Maclear stood panting. He had been fighting 
 harder than he would have thought possible; and the 
 torches were still smoldering behind him between 
 the ledge and the beach. He looked at the long 
 sprawl of the young body in the moonlight. The 
 upturned face was all Sombra's. Maclear was
 
 64 THE BRIDGE 
 
 afraid; his heart contracted. He carried Sal past the 
 torches, laid him on the beach, brought water and 
 bathed his face; presently the boy's eyes opened, 
 and he looked quietly at Maclear. 
 
 "I 'm sorry I hurt you, lad," said Maclear, his 
 anger all gone out of him, "but you made me." 
 
 He need not have justified himself. For Sal's 
 answer was a smile, so suddenly, vividly tender that 
 Maclear was dumb. He dreamed of some day see- 
 ing Sombra smile at him with some such fond look 
 only different, different. Sal said: "It's all right. 
 I 'm used to bein' hit. And you done that fine." 
 
 After a moment Maclear helped him to his feet. 
 He winced and whitened, but refused more help. 
 He said it was only his shoulder, where he had hit 
 on it when he fell. His one anxiety seemed to be 
 that Maclear should not be troubled. His own face, 
 with its strange, brooding look of absorption, was 
 yet serene. "I won't be able to row the boat for a 
 week, and Sombra '11 have to take the next lot of 
 toy boats to town. But it was worth it." 
 
 "Why did you make me do it, Sal?" 
 
 "I wanted to see what I could do against a 
 grown man." 
 
 "Well, you know now." 
 
 "Yes, I know now." 
 
 "You young fool," said Maclear, roughly, "I might 
 have killed you!"
 
 THE SAND 65 
 
 With his faint secret smile, Sal pulled the stumps 
 of the torches from the sand, and cast them into the 
 lake. They drew a thread of sparks through the air, 
 hissed, and were extinguished. 
 
 Maclear remembered that he had not passed them. 
 
 In the calm darkening night, lit with large stars, 
 they went back together to Morning House. Maclear 
 walked with his arm about Salvator, and he had 
 never felt the boy so distant. The meaning of it all 
 had eluded him; once more he had grasped at sand. 
 He had been passive throughout, as when he crouched 
 on the beach in the storm, blown over by the wind 
 and the sand. Those forces which are the passions 
 of nature had not used and mastered him more com- 
 pletely than had this beaten boy. 
 
 He felt that he had been built like a stone into 
 some wall of defense raised by an obscure and tre- 
 mendous fear. 
 
 VII 
 
 Back among the sand-hills, by the winding channel 
 of a lagoon, Sombra had a little garden. 
 
 By continually freeing it of sand, by much carry- 
 ing of marsh soil which the dry winds changed to 
 sand again, by much watering, she had coaxed a few 
 ferns to root here; a few stonecrops, fiery nastur- 
 tiums, blue lobelias turning wild like their fellows
 
 66 THE BRIDGE 
 
 of the marsh. It was the sand itself that brought her 
 the chief profusion of her garden, after all: huge 
 frail convolvuli, white and pink; small grayish- 
 white asters; silver-leaf strung with golden blooms. 
 
 She liked best a small Scotch brier-rose which Sal 
 had brought her from the town; its flowers were 
 golden and honey-sweet. Since Maclear had told 
 her she was like a golden rose growing in the sand 
 she had spent long minutes staring at this bush, won- 
 dering why she was like it, and feeling the conscious- 
 ness of herself slowly flowering in her. 
 
 Here, on the day after the herring-run, Sal found 
 her. 
 
 She sat with her head bent, her hands clasping her 
 knees, looking into the colorless thin water spreading 
 at her feet, which mirrored her and her garden. Her 
 hair was loose, almost colorless too in the great light, 
 for each strand was iridescent as a spider's web. 
 She was crowned with a wreath of pink convolvulus, 
 already drooping in the heat. Sal could not see her 
 face in the shadow of her hair, but he thought she 
 had been crying. He stood watching her a moment, 
 unheard. Then he asked, "Sombra, why 've you got 
 your best waist on?" 
 
 She wore an ugly blouse of pink flannel trimmed 
 with coarse crocheted lace, and a crocheted lace col- 
 lar fastened with a cheap brooch. She lifted her
 
 THE SAND 67 
 
 head slowly. The glory of her hair flowed and hid 
 the thing. She looked at Sal gravely. At last she 
 asked, "Sal, am I beautiful?" 
 
 Her brother considered her; then he glanced at 
 his own reflection in the lagoon, rough black head, 
 rough clothes, one arm in a sling of blue dusters. 
 He answered simply, "There ain't no doubt, Sombra, 
 that we 're terr'ble good-lookin.' ' 
 
 "How do you know?" 
 
 "I 've been to town plenty of times with Mait. 
 The girls there ain't one of them as good-lookin' as 
 you." 
 
 She gloomed at him with her great eyes. After 
 a moment, looking away, she asked slowly: "Sal, 
 would you think I was good-lookin' enough to make 
 any one like me just for that?" 
 
 "I guess so, Sombra." Sal stood very still. 
 
 "How d' you know?" 
 
 He smiled, his faint, obscure smile. "I don't 
 know, of course. But last time I was waitin' for 
 Mait by the wharves, a girl come up to me where I 
 was standin' under the lamp. She was a pretty girl. 
 I guess she was a good girl. I 'd never seen her 
 before. I '11 never see her again. She come up and 
 said, 'I 've been follerin' you all the evenin' till I 'd 
 courage to ask you for somethin'.' 'What 's that?' 
 I said. 'This,' said she, and pulled my head down
 
 68 THE BRIDGE 
 
 with her two hands; and I kissed her. Then she 
 went away. I guess you could have all of that 
 sort you wanted, Sombra." 
 
 "Ain't it all one sort?" 
 
 Sal waited, faintly smiling, looking into the clear 
 water. At last he asked, "Why do you want to know 
 if you 're pretty, Sombra?" 
 
 "Why? Because it 's all I have!" 
 
 She rose suddenly, facing him. Her usual strong 
 serenity was quite broken in her. Her hands clung 
 together, and worked passionately. Then she swept 
 her arms wide, and stood so, facing him. She said, 
 "Look at me! 
 
 "Look at me! Look at my clo'es!" She tore at 
 the pink flannel covering her heart. "Look at this! 
 I used to think it was nice. Now I know it 's poor 
 and ugly and common like us. Look at my 
 hands!" She held them toward him. "They 're all 
 spoiled with work, stained with potato-peelin', 
 scarred where the sand 's got into a cut, or where the 
 frost hurt them, hangin' out washin' in the winter. 
 Listen to me talk. I don't use the right words, I 
 say them wrong; I don't have time to read or study. 
 What I want to know's this: Am I beautiful 
 enough so as all the rest won't matter?" 
 
 "Since, when have you got to be ashamed of your- 
 self, Sombra, and of me?" 
 
 In a moment the passion died out of her. Very
 
 THE SAND 69 
 
 softly and simply she went to her brother, and hid 
 her face on his shoulder. She said, after a little 
 time, "You know." 
 
 "I guess I do." 
 
 "We-'ve nothin', Sal, we are nothin', but just 
 ourselves." 
 
 "Just ourselves." 
 
 "And he even in the clo'es he got in the town 
 here when most of his things was washed away 
 even in them, he 's different." 
 
 "Is he?" The boy was still smiling faintly, as he 
 gazed across her bent head at the dunes. 
 
 "It 's nothin' he says or does. He 's kind, kind. 
 It 's somethin' in me. Sal, a little while ago I 'd 
 have been terrible mad at him for hurtin' you last 
 night." 
 
 "I told you it was my fault." 
 
 "Yes, but it would n't have made no difference, 
 then. Now" her voice sank to a breath he could 
 scarcely hear "it don't seem he could do anything 
 wrong in my eyes." 
 
 Sal waited, something kindling behind his dark 
 reserve. At last he moved. It was to thrust the 
 girl away. He said, "Is it like that with you!" 
 
 She shrank a little. Sal had never turned his 
 fierce look on her before. He faced her like an ad- 
 versary. His words came like stones. 
 
 "You want to know if you "re beautiful enough?
 
 70 THE BRIDGE 
 
 You got to go with Mail to town to-morrow. Walk 
 down Center Street in the evenin'. Any man's 
 looks '11 tell you what you wanter know." 
 
 "Sal" ' 
 
 "Well? You wanter be told how beautiful you 
 are?" He caught her wrist savagely. "You 're beau- 
 tiful enough to make him sell his soul for you in a 
 little while if you 'd like it that way Sombra ?" 
 
 There seemed a sort of fire between them as they 
 stood there, so like, so passionate, mutely question- 
 ing each other. Then the red flamed in the girl's 
 face. Her eyes darkened. She jerked herself free. 
 Once or twice she tried to speak before the words 
 
 came: 
 
 M 
 
 I won't have it that way!" 
 
 She tore the wreath from her head, the lace collar 
 from her neck, and threw them away together. Her 
 hair she swept into a rope, twisted it, strained it 
 back from her face, and pinned it close. Her hands 
 trembled. She paused. Sal said softly, "You 're 
 beautiful yet, Sombra." 
 
 "Then I '11 be beautiful no more!" 
 
 There was a broken clam-shell in the sand at their 
 feet, sharp as a knife. She caught the shell in her 
 hand, and gashed her own face with it, a deep 
 grotesque scratch, broadening into crimson. 
 
 After a moment Sal gently took the shell away
 
 THE SAND 71 
 
 from her and threw it into the lagoon. She did not 
 resist him. She was very still. 
 
 He asked quietly, "Are you goin' to town like 
 that?" 
 
 "I 'm goin' to town like this. I 'm goin' to let 
 every one see me like this. What does that matter? 
 I 'm going to let him see me like this, without even 
 the one thing I have!" 
 
 Sal, smiling faintly, stood out of her way. She 
 moved past him royally, the blood spreading un- 
 stanched on her pale face. 
 
 She was beautiful then, with some fire and force 
 of the spirit, as she had not been before. 
 
 When she was gone, Sal sat in the sand, motionless, 
 his head on his knees. He stayed a long time. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Maclear was watching a cloud. 
 
 When first it appeared above the heat haze on the 
 horizon, he had thought it a sail. 
 
 With a silence that appeared unnatural, this cloud 
 had risen and towered throughout the morning, 
 which had been one of great warmth and stillness. 
 The sand burned. Over the dunes the air quivered. 
 The mirage lifted the base of the cloud above the 
 lake in a perfectly level foundation, upon which va-
 
 72 THE BRIDGE 
 
 pors slowly piled and builded themselves pyrami- 
 dally, with an inner revolving motion; until the vast 
 cone filled the dull sky to the zenith, and gathered 
 all the light to itself, and was reflected like a moun- 
 tain peak of pale rose and gold in the lake below. 
 Besides the inner revolution, the whole mass had a 
 motion of advance. Maclear thought he had never 
 seen so lovely a thing. 
 
 It had not been visible when, a few hours earlier, 
 he had helped Sombra launch the heavy old boat in 
 which she was going with Mait to the town on the 
 mainland. He had carried down a dozen little toy 
 vessels for her, and helped her stow them away, with 
 such other odds and ends as they were taking. She 
 had scarcely spoken to him. For him her eyes were 
 veiled; he saw them heavy as though with weeping, 
 and wondered at that, and at the scar. Her face 
 was pale, weary and spiritless; in the gray glare it 
 seemed to have little beauty, that any one should 
 desire it. 
 
 In this she had her will. 
 
 In nothing else. Maclear watched the old boat 
 passing down the lagoon to the open lake; saw Som- 
 bra ship her oars and Mait rise and set the patched 
 sail as if he could see. A faint hot wind filled the 
 canvas; the boat drifted toward the haze, was pres- 
 ently lost there, that pale face, crossed with the red 
 scar, the last thing that glimmered back upon Mac-
 
 THE SAND 73 
 
 lear. And Sombra had never seemed to him so 
 unendurably dear. 
 
 He had added an errand of his own to those that 
 normally occupied her when she went to town. 
 
 He had the fancy to take her sailing in the eve- 
 nings, when the shore-larks twittered along the la- 
 goons, and there would be dew on the canvas, and 
 great stars waiting for them out on the open lake. 
 He wanted to see her face under the stars. And on 
 the single occasion when he had gone to the town him- 
 self, he had ordered a skiff at the boat-building yard 
 beside the flour-mills. This skiff would now be fin- 
 ished. And he had asked Sombra to bring it back 
 with her; it would tow easily behind the larger boat. 
 
 He had spent most of the morning building a 
 rough penthouse shelter for the skiff, among the 
 fringed gentians which colored the marsh meadows 
 for acres with their dark, pellucid sapphire along the 
 lagoon. The marshes exhaled a strong sour-sweet 
 smell. On the beach of the lagoon a migrating col- 
 umn of great red butterflies had paused to rest; they 
 remained there without motion, their wings erect and 
 shut ; it was as though the sand were covered with the 
 numberless tiny tents of an army. 
 
 In the afternoon Maclear watched the cloud. 
 
 Later he saw Sal standing on a high dune, also 
 watching it. 
 
 The island remained singularly voiceless, empty,
 
 74 THE BRIDGE 
 
 without stir of any life, throughout the day. Mac- 
 lear thought it was because Sombra was away. He 
 began to wonder when she would return. 
 
 Toward evening, and the cloud usurping the 
 whole heaven, he saw Salvator come from the dunes, 
 carrying a load of driftwood on his unhurt arm. 
 He laid this on the lake beach, anJ went back heavily, 
 it seemed for more wood. Maclear went toward him. 
 
 As the cloud had 'drawn all light to itself, so now 
 it seemed to have absorbed the air. When Maclear 
 reached the pile of driftwood, he drew his breath 
 quickly, and his clothing clung to his damp body. 
 
 Sal had just laid the fourth load on the heap, and 
 now stood beside it. His face was raised to the 
 cloud, and the reflected light made it luminous, still, 
 unearthly. Then he lifted his right hand, and struck, 
 passionately and in silence, at his bruised shoulder. 
 
 "What is it?" asked Maclear, quickly. 
 
 "I should n't have let her go alone with Mail. 
 But I thought the weather would keep fair." 
 
 "Is there a storm coming?" 
 
 Sal did not answer. He still struck, softly, cease- 
 lessly, at his own injury, which had kept him on the 
 island and sent Sombra to the town in his place. 
 After a minute the action became intolerable to Mac- 
 lear. He laid his own hand on the boy's, and stilled 
 it; he asked, "Is it the storm you are afraid of?" 
 
 "You know how Mait is in a storm."
 
 THE SAND 75 
 
 Yes. Maclear knew. A vision flashed before him, 
 a vision of Sombra crouching in the stern of the 
 boat, while the old man moved down upon her, with 
 outstretched groping hand and murder in his face, 
 as he had moved down upon Maclear that night in 
 the quiet kitchen. The heat and silence muffled 
 speech like wool laid on the lips. In a minute he 
 said, "They will see the storm coming, and wait." 
 
 "Mait will not see it " 
 
 As though words were futile, Sal's voice trailed 
 to silence. In the sand beside him, Maclear stood 
 like a man half-stunned. Fear had come so sud- 
 denly. 
 
 The great glowing cloud curled slowly, a crest 
 running for miles, the ethereal foam of a wave. 
 
 Maclear asked, "Why are you gathering wood?" 
 
 "It '11 be dark when they get back. There 's no 
 light. Maybe they will need help to make a land- 
 ing." 
 
 "The storm may not break." 
 
 Maclear knew the deadly suddenness of the lakes, 
 but he could not believe that any danger could come 
 from the cloud, now threading here and there into 
 thin wisps which seemed the only real clouds, blow- 
 ing from the height of a bright, uplifted hill. 
 
 Sal did not reply. He went slowly away to fetch 
 more wood. 
 
 After a while Maclear stirred and sighed. He
 
 76 THE BRIDGE 
 
 told himself there was nothing to fear yet. He, 
 too, dragged himself away to look for wood. There 
 was nothing else to do. There was not another 
 boat on the island. 
 
 He dragged at a bleached log, long buried in drift 
 sand. He dug it free with his hands. The sand 
 cut his fingers like glass; they were bleeding when he 
 cleared the log and found it too sodden to burn. 
 Looking at his bleeding fingers, he told himself again 
 that he was afraid of a shadow. 
 
 Salvator passed him, walking heavily in the sand, 
 carrying a load of blanched willow roots. Maclear 
 called to him: "This stuff is all too wet." 
 
 "There 's none better." 
 
 "There 's all Morning House." 
 
 They turned together and ran to the house, which 
 fronted them like the skull of a past life, with multi- 
 ple blank eyeholes. It looked withered and dried 
 in the glare, as though at any moment it might of it- 
 self break into flame. 
 
 As men move in dreams, so they seemed to move, 
 with enormous effort. As they would have done in a 
 dream, they laid hold of the posts of the veranda 
 and wrenched them away in their hands. Showers 
 of slats and shingles tilted almost silently into the 
 sand, leaving the gaunt corner of some room naked 
 to the light. They toiled on in the heat and oppres- 
 sion, tearing away and carrying to the beach boards,
 
 THE SAND 77 
 
 laths, the sun-rotted sashes of glassless windows, the 
 railings of untrodden stairs. There was something 
 monstrous, out of nature, in the manner in which 
 Morning House yielded itself to destruction; it ap- 
 peared to destroy itself. 
 
 The pile on the beach rose high as the day dark- 
 ened, and the cloud turned leaden, and the lake took 
 on a milky hue. The work and the dream-like dis- 
 gust of it in that they seemed to be feeding their 
 pyre with something that had once lived and was now 
 dead tired their minds as well as their bodies. 
 
 Maclear told himself that there was nothing to 
 fear. He knew that if necessary they could fire 
 Morning House itself, and he thought how the flame 
 would spread and feed on it, and run to the willow 
 thickets and the poplars, till all the island was a con- 
 suming torch to light Sombra home. 
 
 They rested a little. The storm had not broken. 
 Once or twice they were aware of distant thunder, 
 more as a tremor of the atmosphere than as a sound. 
 Sal said, "I am goin' to light the fire soon." 
 
 That was the first time either had spoken for an 
 hour. 
 
 They waited a little longer. Then Sail lighted 
 the pile. 
 
 The kindling flame fed eagerly on the shavings, 
 the dried grass, the lesser twigs; leapt immediately, 
 and seized on those sun-rotted boards. As if the
 
 78 THE BRIDGE 
 
 outer fire released some terrible energy within itself, 
 the stuff of Morning House sprang into flame, roared, 
 and was consumed in a breath. And as if fire an- 
 swered to fire, from the depth of the cloud a cloth of 
 flame seemed suddenly lowered and caught back. In 
 the darkness after the lightning their fire lighted the 
 dunes, the lake, the cloud itself. They saw they 
 must bring more fuel. 
 
 They went to and fro under the cloud, working in 
 a narrowing world that seemed all on fire. 
 
 They rested again, without the intolerable circle 
 of heat. There was another flash of lightning. 
 Maclear asked, "Do you see anything of the boat 
 yet?" 
 
 Sal was standing out on the ledge, to his knees in 
 the glassy water. He answered : "No. But here 's 
 the first wind." 
 
 A white line, like a line of mist, was running 
 shoreward under the cloud. Maclear saw this first 
 gust, compact in itself as a thrown stone, strike the 
 boy before he himself felt it. Then he was blinded 
 a moment with wind and spray. The gust passed, 
 moaning, inland. In the following silence he heard 
 it break on Morning House like a wave. 
 
 Their fire, which had been beaten down and blown 
 into flying rags of flame, sprang erect. 
 
 Another blaze of pallid lightning showed them the 
 convolutions of the cloud rigid as iron above, trail-
 
 THE SAND 79 
 
 ing milky skirts of vapor. From this vapor another 
 white line broke glimmering and rushed toward 
 them. Maclear was out on the ledge now with Sal. 
 The second gust struck them together; foam broke 
 suddenly to their waists. Sal clung to Maclear. 
 His voice came like the crying of a gull: 
 
 "I think I saw the boat." 
 
 Both waited for the next flash. In it they saw 
 something small and dark far out on the lake, flying 
 on the face of the rushing vapor like a bird. A 
 wave, cold as ice, crashed on the island, broke on Sal 
 to the breast; Maclear caught him, and drew him 
 back to the beach. The boy said, "That was the 
 boat." 
 
 "What will it be best to do?" 
 
 "There 's nothing much we can do. They 're 
 racin' the storm. Me, I think the storm and the 
 boat will about strike on the island together. 
 They '11 beach the boat. No time for anything else. 
 When she strikes, run in and haul her up." 
 
 Maclear nodded, his eyes straining to find and 
 hold that faint flying speck where Sombra was com- 
 ing to him. 
 
 In that moment his doubts and his hesitations 
 passed. This was his appointed time, his day of 
 salvation. 
 
 He knew that this untaught girl, blown toward him 
 on the face of the storm, was alike his only weapon
 
 80 THE BRIDGE 
 
 and his only refuge; that only in the shelter of her 
 unquestioning love would he be able to live; that 
 only if armed at all points with her trust would he 
 be strong to meet the betraying thing. She was his 
 rock; lacking her, his life would go down in sand. 
 
 If the knowledge, come to him thus clearly and 
 immediately, was in itself defeat, he did not see it so. 
 It was at least the measure of his passion, of its 
 power, of its necessity, that passion rooted in need; 
 to him it seemed an exquisite fulfilment. 
 
 He was lifted in a kind of exaltation. He could 
 see the boat plainly now, flying down upon the island. 
 Thunder, the noise of the waves, in his mood seemed 
 only the great music, as of gates lifted up and the 
 fountains of the deep, that companied his love, com- 
 ing home. 
 
 The boat came nearer. Behind it everything was 
 lost in a terrible misty smother, a dissolution of air 
 and water, one with the other. They stood ready 
 to seize the boat when she struck the beach. Maclear 
 had never felt so calm; never so strong. 
 
 Nearer she staggered under a terrible press of 
 sail; nearer. Mail was at the tiller. Maclear saw 
 Sombra crouched forward. He smiled. As though 
 he could see, Mail was holding the boat straight on 
 the line of their fire; she fled toward them on a crim- 
 son path; steep waves began to overtake her; those 
 two waiting on the beach were blown now, stung with
 
 THE SAND 81 
 
 spray, blinded with level rain. Maclear was no 
 longer afraid. She was there. 
 
 "Now!" cried Salvator in his ear. 
 
 They leapt into the foam together. 
 
 The boat came down upon them. For a moment 
 she was flung upward, tossed to heaven; then she 
 rushed toward them on a sliding hillock of foam, 
 hung, hesitated, took the sand, reeled on again. 
 She struck, heeling far over. They thought she 
 would go to pieces under their eyes. The blind man 
 had not shortened sail, and mast and sail seemed to 
 melt away into the wind; for at that moment the 
 weight of the storm struck also. There was no other 
 sound to be heard. Maclear and Salvator ran in 
 and seized the thwarts, heaving and straining against 
 the grip of the sand. 
 
 They had her up in the thinner surf after a sharp 
 fight. Thinking only of Sombra, Maclear leapt into 
 the boat and stooped over that crouching shape in the 
 bows. 
 
 Coats, canvas, tarpaulins, these things were in 
 his hands, and he cast them away. They fell to a 
 horrible vacancy. There was no one there. 
 
 There was no one in the boat but Mait. 
 
 Maclear searched like a madman. Sal was with 
 him. Sal lifted a broken rope from the stern and 
 showed him the end, trailing in the water. Maclear 
 could not hear what those white lips said to him for
 
 82 THE BRIDGE 
 
 the drive of the rain and the spray. But he was in- 
 stantly still, seeing the whole thing. 
 
 Somhra must have been in the skiff towing astern, 
 that her weight might prevent the light boat over- 
 riding the heavy one. Mait could sail a boat by the 
 feel of wind and tiller and the sound of the 
 waves. But why had he not taken her aboard? 
 When had he lost her? When had the rope parted? 
 Mait was slowly climbing the beach, and Maclear, 
 numb and motionless himself, saw the boy run to the 
 old man, and heard those wild questions with his 
 soul, not his bodily sense. He saw Sal clinging to 
 Mait, crying to him with a dreadful beseeching. 
 But Mait struck him out of the way and strode on, 
 silent. Sal lay where he had fallen in the surf and 
 the running shingle, beating at the stones with his 
 hands. 
 
 So much Maclear saw. A horror was on him. 
 He did not go to Salvator. He leapt from the water- 
 logged boat and ran from that place, stumbling. 
 Again, his foothold in life was swept from him, he 
 was blown like a grain of sand in the senseless ruin 
 of events. Once more he was shelterless. He had 
 lost her. 
 
 Behind him, the fire he and Salvator had built 
 the fire to guide her home sank and was quenched 
 by the spray.
 
 THE SAND 83 
 
 IX 
 
 The storm had long been past. 
 
 For hours the islarid had lain under a sky cleared 
 of all but a few clouds of a dove-like whiteness, si- 
 lent save for the solemn thunder of the waves along 
 all its beaches ; the wet sands shimmered in the moon- 
 light like pearl. 
 
 For hours Maclear had paced these beaches, look- 
 ing for what any wave might leave there. 
 
 He remembered nothing of those hours. 
 
 He was drenched and very cold, his clothing torn, 
 his body bruised. He did not know how he had come 
 to be so. He was conscious neither of his exhaus- 
 tion nor of his despair. He had simply ceased to 
 feel. He was aware of nothing, except the resolve 
 that he would not survive Sombra. 
 
 With this last Judas-kiss of life, when she had been 
 taken from him at the moment he realized his su- 
 preme need of her, no compromise was possible. 
 
 He thought of nothing but this. When Salvator 
 found him in the night, and spoke to him, brokenly 
 and with tears, and walked beside him in his endless 
 pacing of the sands, he hardly knew it. 
 
 Now the night was drawing toward dawn. Sal 
 had left him. He was alone. 
 
 He stood on a low promontory, a spur of sand 
 thrust out into the melancholy thunder of the surf.
 
 84 THE BRIDGE 
 
 He was waiting; waiting only to find her, and then 
 to follow her where she had gone. 
 
 Even before the stars paled the lake told him of 
 the approach of dawn; it grew a little luminous, as 
 though light were born in it, far down beneath the 
 surface. Ij>y imperceptible gradations the deep 
 water was colored with blue, the shallows with green. 
 The moon had set long ago. 
 
 Maclear waited for the last dawn he would ever 
 see. 
 
 Light came suddenly at last, and long before the 
 sun. As though veils had been torn away, he 
 stood on the low sandy promontory and gazed east- 
 ward across the tumbling ridges of blue and white 
 to where, beyond the shallows, something dark rolled 
 in the trough of the wave. 
 
 In a minute he saw that it was a small boat, 
 nearly awash. 
 
 Maclear began to tremble. He went down the 
 slope of sand to the beach. From here he could not 
 see the boat for a little while. Then it lifted on a 
 higher wave. Water-logged, it drifted very slowly 
 shoreward, lost repeatedly in the shadowy hollows, 
 visible again against the running foam, toward the 
 spot where they had built the fire. 
 
 Maclear waded toward it through the surf, which 
 was still strong. So slowly the waves shouldered the 
 skiff to land that presently he was swimming heavily.
 
 THE SAND 85 
 
 He had no doubt at all that this was the skiff he had 
 asked Sombra to bring back for him, nor that he 
 should find her in it. Nor had he any hope at all 
 that he should find her living. 
 
 He swam out in the colorless twilight. An un- 
 earthly purity rested on everything. The last stars 
 were withdrawn. 
 
 When he reached the boat he was too weak even 
 to raise himself and look into it, low as it lay in the 
 water. He could only float with it to shore, shoul- 
 dered in by the waves. Even when it had taken the 
 sand, he could do no more for a while than rest be- 
 side it, holding to it with his hands. 
 
 Then he drew himself erect, and looked. 
 
 She lay as he had known she would lie, with her 
 head on a seat, and her black hair floating in the 
 water which more than half filled the pretty little 
 varnished boat. Her face, pale as pearl, seemed 
 purely asleep; across it the cut showed darkly. Her 
 hands stirred in the water as the skiff shifted on its 
 keel under Maclear's hands. 
 
 He stooped, took her in his arms. Her head fell 
 slackly on his shoulder, the water rained from her 
 hair, her clinging clothes. He carried her away 
 from the boat and laid her gently on the beach. 
 Spent as he was, somehow he did not feel that weight. 
 He knelt beside her, with no thought, looking at her 
 face.
 
 86 THE BRIDGE 
 
 Greatly as she would have given to him in every- 
 thing, she could give nothing now, not even a look. 
 He would have taken all she had to give. Now, as 
 she could not give, he would not take even so much 
 as a touch of her beloved cold lips. 
 
 He took his wet coat and rolled it clumsily into a 
 pillow to keep her head from the sand. He straight- 
 ened her limbs, her dress ; gathered her cold wet hair 
 neatly on each side of her face. He remembered 
 how warm it had been that day he kissed it in the 
 sun. He might have spoken then, when she was 
 looking at him with her soft, surrendered eyes ; when 
 she was alive, and near. Now she was gone so far 
 she would never hear, though he cried to her all day, 
 like this, "I love you, Sombra! I love you!" 
 
 He caught her in his arms, crushed her sweet un- 
 responsive face to his heart, told her again and again. 
 Too late. 
 
 He rose at last, still holding her, staring out to 
 the deep water, where light was coming to birth. He 
 took a step toward the lake, carrying her. A dark 
 pressure and obscurity was on his mind. He saw the 
 world like a dream on the edge of reality, receding. 
 With the foam about his feet, he went slowly toward 
 the deep water, carrying her. 
 
 Then he stopped, aware for the first time of hands 
 that clung to him, of a haggard face turned to his 
 own, of beseeching words.
 
 THE SAND 87 
 
 He asked gently, "What is it, Sal?" 
 
 "I been tryin' to make you listen these five min- 
 utes. Oh, put her down! give her to me! She ain't 
 drowned. It 's the cold and the wet. She ain't 
 dead!" 
 
 Maclear listened, shook his head; the words 
 seemed to have no meaning. He went a little deeper 
 into the surf with his burden. 
 
 "Mr. Maclear! Alan, for God's sake, listen! 
 You love her. So do I. Give her to me. I won't 
 hurt her. I tell you she 's alive!" 
 
 "What do you say?" 
 
 "Alan, I tell you she's alive!" 
 
 Maclear began to tremble again. Something was 
 here greater than he could endure, hope. He al- 
 lowed Sal to take Sombra from him and lay her 
 again on the beach. He stammered: "Take her. 
 But give her back to me." 
 
 "By God, I will!" 
 
 "What are you going to do with her, Sal?" 
 
 The boy turned on him a face of white life: "The 
 stove 's out long ago at home. There 's just one 
 thing on the island with warmth in it, the sand 
 where we had our fire. I 'm goin' to warm her in the 
 sand." He laid hold of the sleeves of Sombra's 
 clinging blouse, and rent them from shoulder to 
 wrist. He said to Maclear: "Go and clear the em- 
 bers away. You can't help me in this."
 
 88 THE BRIDGE 
 
 Maclear went unsteadily to the circle of blackened 
 wood coals on the beach. He cleared them aside 
 with his hands. Here and there a smoldering core 
 of heat was left to scorch him, but he did not feel 
 it. The sand beneath was still hot. 
 
 He called to Sal, "What else shall I do?" 
 
 "Dig a hole in the sand. Not too deep. As 
 though you was diggin' a grave." 
 
 Maclear stooped and dug desperately, making a 
 long, shallow depression in the sand, like the begin- 
 ning of a grave. 
 
 "You got that done, Alan?" 
 
 "Yes," said Maclear, and stood away, looking out 
 toward the growing day. 
 
 He did not look when the boy passed him, carry- 
 ing, sheltered in his coat, that shape no whiter than 
 his own face. He did not turn when Sal laid Som- 
 bra in the trench and heaped the sand above her, 
 till she was buried from throat to feet in the warm 
 dust. He waited, seeing only the dawn. 
 
 He did not know if the dawn brought death or life. 
 
 A supreme stillness held all life in suspension. 
 It hovered between two worlds, as the light hovered 
 there on the horizon, half minded to take wing. 
 Along all the marshes of the island not a leaf was 
 moved; yet glittering with rain and cold spray, the 
 small flowers were lifeless and still as jewels; in 
 Sombra's garden, her yellow rose held only a few
 
 THE SAND 89 
 
 chill petals, close-sleeked like the wings of the moths 
 that clung to it. 
 
 All being was like a great clean-swept shell, in 
 which nothing had life but the hollow and solemn 
 sound of the waves. 
 
 The sun had not yet risen. But far overhead 
 Maclear saw a single fleck of highest cloud glow 
 suddenly like a star. And from the heart of that 
 brightness, drawn along the east behind the hard sap- 
 phired ridges of the waves, one white bird was fly- 
 ing to the shore. 
 
 As he waited, the sky, the waste of water, the soli- 
 tary bird returning between them, became a thing 
 mingled and woven forever with his existence. 
 
 Sal came quietly to his side. The boy's face was 
 wet with tears. He put his arm about Maclear's 
 neck. He said gently, "Alan, come to her/' 
 
 Maclear could not stir for a moment; he had 
 traveled too far in that stillness. He saw the white 
 bird wheel above the surf and descend to it surely, 
 and rest. 
 
 "Come and speak to her, Alan." 
 
 "Is she?" 
 
 "She 's safe. She 's alive." 
 
 After a moment Maclear turned, drew Sal toward 
 him, lightly brushed the black head with his lips. 
 His own face was wet. He did not remember that he 
 had wept. He said: "Sal, what I have to say to
 
 90 THE BRIDGE 
 
 Sombra I can't say even before you, who have 
 brought her back to me. Will you leave her alone 
 with me a very little while?" 
 
 **Yes. I must go to the house and kindle the 
 stove and bring a blanket or somethin'. I won't be 
 long. I '11 come back for you.*' But he lingered a 
 minute, looking at Maclear wistfully. 
 
 "She 's yours, SaL Trust me to keep her for 
 you, a little while." 
 
 "I guess she's not mine any more," said Sal, 
 softly. 
 
 He went away. Maclear turned and sank on his 
 knees beside Sombra. He did not speak at first. 
 He wanted nothing but to look at her face and be as- 
 sured of the life there. 
 
 She looked at him also in that silence, with the 
 searching, questioning expression of one who has 
 been far from life for a little while, and finds some 
 new quality in the things of life on her return. At 
 last, seeing how he had suffered for her, she stirred a 
 little under her sandy covering, and stretched to him 
 her hand, glittering with the stuff that had saved her. 
 
 He took it in his, raised it to his lips. He could 
 only say, "My dear love." 
 
 She drew him weakly toward her, saying, "Kiss 
 me, Alan." 
 
 There was no joy in her voice, but a solemn and 
 meek acceptance. She seemed to say, Be it unto
 
 THE SAND 91 
 
 me according to thy word. As his lips touched hers, 
 she whispered: "I'm glad glad that I'm to see 
 you again. There, in the boat, I thought of you." 
 
 Maclear remembered how nearly that rich voice 
 with its homely speech had been lost forever in si- 
 lence. He said, "I love you, Sombra." 
 
 "I love you, Alan. I've loved you all the time. 
 It seems there never was a time before I loved you, 
 But it ain't right I should. I *m not fit for you." 
 
 "Sombra your eyes are full of tears. Let 
 me wipe them for you." 
 
 She smiled at him. He wiped her eyes, and she 
 laughed a small, faint laugh at her own helplessness. 
 She said: "Will you lift my head a little? The 
 sand 's heavy, though it 's lovely and warm. It was 
 so cold in the boat," 
 
 Not trusting himself to speak, he raised her head 
 on his hand, let it lie there. The trembling of that 
 hand communicated some shadowy trouble to her 
 returning life. She whispered to him: "It's good 
 to have you near. But if I done right, I would 
 send you away from me never see you no more." 
 
 He looked at her sternly. The passion of his need 
 rose in him, hard, clear as a flame. The receding 
 waves had left on the beach a clam-shell, brimmed 
 with water, and large enough to hold all night the 
 images of a few stars. Now the stars were gone. 
 As he looked he saw the water rosed and transfused
 
 92 THE BRIDGE 
 
 into wine, the miracle of the full dawn made mani- 
 fest in that narrow cup. 
 
 He lifted the blue oval to her lips and said, 
 "Drink." 
 
 She sipped from it, her large grave eyes on his, 
 wondering. When she had drunk, he too drank of 
 that cold, pure water. Words were in his mind: 
 "Water of life, clear as crystal." They two should 
 drink of the water of life in one sacrament. 
 
 He said to her, faintly smiling: "It's a charm. 
 Nothing can part us now." 
 
 The sky, the sand, the foam, the shell in his hand, 
 burned ineffably into thin gold. The sun had risen. 
 
 Sombra was silent. Behind them, in the poplar 
 thickets, a shore-lark began his silvery roving song.
 
 II 
 
 THE MIST
 
 MACLEAR stood on the long wharf beyond the 
 flour-mills which were the small town's reason 
 for being. A steamer was coming in from one of 
 the lake ports lower down; as he was idle, he waited 
 to see her arrive. A small crowd of people were 
 waiting, too, perhaps with better reason. Many of 
 these people forgot the nearing ship a moment in 
 watching Maclear. 
 
 It would have been difficult to say why he inter- 
 ested them. Perhaps it was the look in his face, the 
 singular hard radiance that filled it, as though the 
 mechanism of defiance or resolution were here used 
 to express happiness. He was unconscious of their 
 interest. 
 
 Night came earlier now. Soon after the steamer 
 appeared on the horizon, bearing straight down on 
 the wharf, the lake had taken that peculiar and steel- 
 like blue which seems the color of solitude itself, and 
 reveals the Northern cold lying in wait perpetually 
 behind the fierce brief summer. One or two lights 
 shone whitely in the town. Round the tall brick 
 
 95
 
 96 THE BRIDGE 
 
 chimney of the mills thousands of swallows circled in 
 ceaseless motion, as they used to circle the forest 
 trees that stood here. Their indifferent, joyous 
 flight seemed to say: "Wait, and in a little while we 
 shall again fly about trees, though many of us shall 
 never outlive the year." 
 
 As the steamer approached the wharf an old Indian 
 woman came in the still blue dusk, carrying a basket 
 of red cloth pincushions worked with red and blue 
 beads, beaded moccasins, and little birch-bark canoes 
 for sale. She spread her wares on the edge of the 
 wharf where the passengers must go by, and squatted 
 behind them silently. Maclear went and rummaged 
 in the basket, conscious that at the moment the 
 steamer had floated the last few yards of her journey, 
 reached the wharf, and been moored. In the great 
 lake silence he heard the creak of the hawsers, the 
 voices, the thuds of freight thrown out on the plank- 
 ing, clear but small, as if a distance intervened. 
 Then people began to pass him, going on board, go- 
 ing up to the town. 
 
 He did not turn to glance at them, for at the bot- 
 tom of the old woman's basket he had come upon a 
 pair of moccasins worked with dyed porcupine quills 
 and lined with rabbit fur. He bought them. Seeing 
 his pleasure, the old creature doubled their price. 
 He paid it without question. He would have paid
 
 THE MIST 97 
 
 much more for the delight of putting the pretty things 
 on Sombra's small browned feet. 
 
 He had not heard that some one, among the many 
 who passed him, had paused, hesitated, and stopped, 
 and now stood behind him, waiting till he should 
 turn. 
 
 He turned, smiling at the moccasins in his hand, 
 and looked from them into Moira's face. 
 
 Still as she, he waited for the shock of enforced 
 recollection, of associated pain; for to him she must 
 always come with a shadow of pain. But nothing 
 troubled him. 
 
 Then Maclear knew that he was free of the past. 
 He asked quietly, "Why are you here?" 
 
 "I came here to find you, Alan. I have found 
 you sooner than I hoped I should." 
 
 "Why did you want to find me?" 
 
 She looked at him curiously, aware, even in that 
 first minute which to her was fuller of emotion than 
 she could well suffer, of a resistance in him that was 
 almost hostility. The eyes that met her own were 
 quite cold, quite unmoved. Maclear was looking 
 down at her as though she were a stranger. She 
 thought of that last time, when she had looked down 
 at him, when he had lain at her feet. They had 
 been nearer in soul then. She said with some dif- 
 ficulty, "I did not come to hurt you, Alan."
 
 98 THE BRIDGE 
 
 "You could n't do that, Moira." 
 
 The words, gentle in themselves, held a ring of 
 strange hardness. He had spoken as much to him- 
 self as to her. Both knew it for the truth; both felt 
 between them a separation deep as the sea. And this 
 separation was neither of sin, nor remorse, nor sor- 
 row. It was of happiness. 
 
 She had hardly held herself to the courage for 
 this journey. She had questioned, doubted, ago- 
 nized. Now that she saw this man, whom once for a 
 little while she had all but loved, who once in his 
 way had all but loved her, her heart failed. She 
 asked unsteadily, "Is there anywhere we can talk a 
 little while?" 
 
 He still looked at her, master of himself, master 
 of her. He asked again, "Why have you come?" 
 
 "I fancied you in great loneliness and trouble, as 
 I was. I came to comfort you." 
 
 "You could n't do that, Moira." 
 
 Again the gentle words with their half -cruel mean- 
 ing. She said in a low voice: "No. I see that I 
 could not. But, having come, and having found you 
 so quickly, I will say what I meant to say. Where 
 can we go?" 
 
 He did not answer for a moment, nor stir. And 
 she said quickly, in a kind of amazement, knowing 
 his thought, "You '11 at least listen?"
 
 THE MIST 99 
 
 "If you wish it. But I 'm not staying in the town. 
 I 'm afraid I have nowhere to take you." 
 
 "It does n't matter in the least. I knew you were 
 not staying here. I have your address from Mr. 
 Raynham. He would hardly give it to me; but he 
 was anxious about you too, afraid, as I was, that 
 you were ill and alone " 
 
 She broke off, again watching him with a kind of 
 wonder; his health, his strength, his good looks, had 
 never been so apparent; they seemed to her an insult 
 to remembrance; but then she told herself that she 
 was a woman. 
 
 "I am going to the hotel, anyway. From there I 
 was going to try to reach you with what I had to 
 say. But I can say it here, and now." 
 
 Maclear said slowly and, as she well knew, unwill- 
 ingly: 
 
 "Come a little way along the beach, then. No one 
 is there to overhear." 
 
 He led her from the wharf and along the beach on 
 the side away from the town. It was solitary except 
 for a man who drove along the shingle in a farm 
 wagon, and by the wharf turned his team into the 
 waves to water them. The beasts drank deep, then 
 lifted their heads and snuffed the air toward the 
 horizon, shoulder-deep in quiet foam. Maclear led 
 Moira to a stranded log beneath some acacia bushes
 
 100 THE BRIDGE 
 
 that grew from the low cliff behind the beach. He 
 said, "We can talk here." 
 
 She was tired. She sat down on the log, looking 
 up at him. He stood before her. It was as though 
 he were almost out of sight, of hearing, of her who 
 spoke to him from grief. He waited for her to begin. 
 
 The impulse to leave him, with all she had come 
 to tell him untold, was strong on her. What she had 
 considered the spiritual command was stronger still. 
 She said, "You don't know what I came to say to 
 you?" 
 
 "Of course not." Again with amazement she 
 heard the forbearance in his voice. 
 
 "You don't wish to hear?" 
 
 "I wish you to do anything that seems good to you. 
 I thought there was n't much left in the world to say 
 between us. I never even expected to see you again. 
 But if you have found anything that must be said, 
 say it, Moira, and let me go." 
 
 His words left her adrift, helplessly catching at a 
 response that was not there. Pride of sorrow alone 
 helped her to go on. "I '11 say it, then. I came to 
 forgive you." 
 
 He remained looking down at her in silence, not- 
 ing that her delicate fair face was worn, her eyes un- 
 naturally large, her whole expression one of an al- 
 most solemn sweetness. Now the sense of distance 
 was with him. She seemed to have passed on a long
 
 THE MIST 101 
 
 way beyond him. And her physical fragility touched 
 him as nothing she could say had power to do. 
 
 He said, more gently, "That is very fine of you, 
 Moira. But " 
 
 The inadequate words filled her with a sudden bit- 
 ter amusement. That struggle of the soul, that awful 
 strife with grief and hate, to be so rewarded! She 
 repeated, "But?" 
 
 "Do you want the truth?" 
 
 "Always, from you." 
 
 Even that did not move him. He looked at her 
 .compassionately, yet with a suggestion of righteous 
 impatience behind the compassion. 
 
 He said: "Then I will tell you the truth. It's 
 purely the least thing I can do for you, when you 
 have come so far for me. And remember that 
 you Ve asked me for it, that I should n't have given 
 it to you of myself." 
 
 "Well, Alan?" 
 
 In the deepening dusk her face, upturned to him, 
 gleamed with the unearthly whiteness, the unearthly 
 delicacy, of a flower. He hesitated again, and see- 
 ing it, she flung out her hands to him in a gesture of 
 scorn. "Oh!" she said, "don't try to find pleasant 
 words! Don't try to spare me! Tell me the truth. 
 You don't want to be reminded, even by forgiveness? 
 You want to forget it all?" 
 
 "I want to forget. And I am forgetting."
 
 102 THE BRIDGE 
 
 He turned from her, took a few short paces on 
 the stones, and came back. She waited, motionless, 
 her sad eyes staring at him through the twilight. 
 
 "There 's more. Back there, in the city, when I 
 saw you " 
 
 Her eyes caught and held his. Incredibly, it was 
 hers that failed. 
 
 "Back there, I was sick. I was not myself. 
 Without minimizing my sorrow for what 's happened, 
 Moira, I must say this: I don't hold myself as guilty 
 as you hold me; and I don't see myself as greatly in 
 need of forgiveness for what I could help no more 
 than you could." 
 
 "The bridge" 
 
 "Did I design it to fall?" 
 
 "And he" 
 
 As though from a spiritual security greater than 
 any to which she could attain, he answered calmly: 
 "He knows, if he knows anything, and you know, 
 that I 'd have given my life -for his, any day." 
 
 She saw him, for a moment, faint and indistinct. 
 He went on, with a rising bitterness: "A terrible mis- 
 fortune came to me. You, with your weight of for- 
 giveness, would turn it into a crime. Good God! one 
 would think I 'd killed Gordon with my own hands! 
 I did no more than a hundred others do with no bad 
 results. And you 'd make me pay for all! Moira, 
 it was no crime. I refuse to take that degree of re-
 
 THE MIST 103 
 
 sponsibility, to accept it from you. I did wrong, 
 but I won't submit to punishment for something of 
 which I 'm as innocent in intention as you. It was 
 one of the terrible tricks life sometimes plays on 
 any one of us, on you, or me, or any one. Life 
 it would grind us to dust, if we 'd let it. Don't for- 
 give me too much, Moira; don't forgive me for what, 
 after all, I did n't do!" 
 
 She was silent, blankly bewildered, blankly won- 
 dering. Almost he had put her in the wrong, made 
 her less than just, less than kind, her who had 
 broken what was left of her heart in order that she 
 might pity and forgive. She could find no words 
 in which to refute him. Words were nothing. This 
 difference lay in the very language of the soul; this 
 distortion lay in the very sight of the spiritual eyes. 
 The tragic facts were common to them both; he could 
 not deny these, but he saw them out of relation, 
 strangely veiled, the large small, the small great, as 
 things are seen through mist. And he was quite 
 blind to what had lain the corner-stone of that 
 tragedy. 
 
 He was still looking at her steadily. The pity 
 which she had come to give him, though it killed her, 
 he gave her. She smiled faintly, feeling very tired, 
 too tired to resist, too tired to argue, too tired to ex- 
 plain. She said, very slowly: "Then it comes to 
 this: You don't want to be forgiven?"
 
 104 THE BRIDGE 
 
 He corrected her: "I don't need to be." 
 
 She just breathed the words, "You can get on with- 
 out it!" 
 
 He assented gravely: "I can get on without it, in 
 the sense in which you offer it. I must go on. I 
 must live my life. I must forget. I 'm a man. 
 Not as you. I can't keep myself turning like a 
 wheel around a perpetual shaft of remorse, of grief. 
 And I wouldn't if I could, for a dreadful disaster 
 for which, in the higher moral light of motive, I 'm 
 not responsible." 
 
 He was so assured that for an instant Moira had 
 a reeling vision of altered values, of facts shifting 
 and changing ground, of the real becoming shadow, 
 and the shadow becoming truth, like things seen in 
 a flowing mist. She controlled herself, and the glass 
 through which she had seen darkly cleared. After 
 a moment she asked, "When are you going home?" 
 
 "I don't know. Not yet. Not until I must. 
 Raynham will send the schooner for me soon, or if 
 anything happens to make it necessary. He 's quite 
 competent to carry on in small things, and there are 
 no big ones on hand just now." He frowned a min- 
 ute, thinking of the bridge, hoping that the inquiry 
 would be soon now, and the air cleared, and business 
 good again, in time. It would take time, of course. 
 "I shall stay away as long as I can. Will you be 
 in the city when I go back?"
 
 THE MIST 105 
 
 "No. I am going south for the winter. I only 
 came to to speak to you before I went." 
 
 He said quickly, "Don't think I 'm ungrateful, 
 for what you intended." 
 
 "For what you refuse " 
 
 He had been looking away from her, looking down 
 the beach toward the wharf. Now he turned on her 
 with a fierce passionateness she had never known in 
 him before. He said in a low voice: "By God, you 
 good woman! Do you want to make me out a mur- 
 derer in the face of the truth?" 
 
 She shut her eyes, almost terrified at the abyss 
 which lay between them; shaken by the mere mas- 
 culine force of his anger; and all the time with a 
 sense of blurred vision, of choked breath, of warn- 
 ing voices thin and displaced, as by an invisible fog. 
 She did not reply. By and by he continued quietly: 
 
 "There is no need to try to talk of this any more. 
 It is better left alone. Neither you nor I shall over- 
 look our grief. Neither you nor I can judge the 
 other. Neither you nor I, it seems, can adjust him- 
 self to the other's point of view. If I have hurt you 
 in this, I 'm sorry. I 'd do pretty nearly anything 
 in the world for you but this. I won't, by accept- 
 ing your tremendous forgiveness, brand myself a 
 Cain before you." 
 
 She rose, i|nable to bear anything further, longing 
 to be alone, that in one of the mystic communions
 
 106 THE BRIDGE 
 
 in which of late her failing flesh had been sustained 
 she might confess to Gordon that she had failed; 
 ask, with intense hearing strained beyond the hush 
 of the night, his advice; find, perhaps, somewhere 
 under the stars, an echo of his comfort. Maclear 
 asked, "Will you let me take you to your hotel?" 
 
 "No. No, thank you, Alan. I would rather go 
 alone." 
 
 He saw she meant it. He said: "As you wish. I 
 am waiting here for some one. Then I am going 
 out to the island." 
 
 "To Port Tallis?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Moira looked beyond him. She asked, "Is this the 
 one you were waiting for?" 
 
 Maclear turned. Moira, watching him rather than 
 the one who came to him along the beach, saw his 
 fine hard face suddenly soften to a great tenderness. 
 The marks of life cleared; he looked as though he 
 had never suifered in anything, never sinned in any- 
 thing. And there was something besides this, infi- 
 nitely moving and appealing. It was an uncommon 
 expression for any man's face to wear. Seen on his, 
 it was incredible. For it was the look of weakness 
 dependent on strength. 
 
 Sombra approached them slowly. Her beauty 
 took on some of the grandeur of the coming night. 
 Her eyes rested on Moira a moment, then went to
 
 THE MIST 107 
 
 Maclear. And even in the twilight Moira could per- 
 ceive the color leap to the browned cheeks, the breath 
 to the noble bosom. 
 
 She asked, uncertainly, "Is this " 
 
 "Yes," answered Maclear, directly. "I was mar- 
 ried to her last week. This is Sombra, my wife." 
 
 After a long minute Moira went to the girl and 
 took her hands. She said, brokenly : "You 're my 
 sister, then. I hope you will be as happy as I was." 
 
 "Thank you, ma'am," answered Sombra. 
 "You 're very kind. I did n't know Alan had a 
 sister." 
 
 "I was his brother's wife." 
 
 Sombra's great kind eyes rested on the fair worn 
 face, on the black dress. Suddenly she leaned for- 
 ward, and touched Moira's cheek with her warm lips. 
 
 "I 'm sure that was a good wish," she said softly, 
 "and I couldn't help but be happy with Alan; 
 could I?" 
 
 But Moira could not reply. At the touch of 
 those innocent, trustful lips the tears had come. She 
 pressed Sombra's hand and turned from them along 
 the shadowy beach, weeping. Sombra asked Mac- 
 lear, "Ain't you goin' along with her, Alan?" 
 
 He said gravely, "She would rather go alone." 
 
 "She 'd come to see you, Alan?" 
 
 "Yes. She 'd come to see if I was well and 
 happy."
 
 108 THE BRIDGE 
 
 'That was sweet of her, poor lady. It don't 
 seem right to let her go that way. What did you 
 tell her? Did you say you was happy?" 
 
 Under the delicate acacia leaves, between the low 
 cliff and the foam, Maclear caught her to him. His 
 lips were crushed to hers. There was something hard 
 and defiant in his love. He said presently, in an un- 
 steady voice: "I told her I was happy as heaven. 
 Happy, happy, happy. Gome, Sombra, let us go 
 home." 
 
 II 
 
 Under the gray curve of the sail the low stars led 
 them. There was dew on the sail, dew on the sheets. 
 Tallis Island lay ahead like a shadow growing nearer 
 each moment. They were infinitely alone. On the 
 lake no sail showed but theirs. 
 
 Sombra sat in the stern with Maclear. Her head 
 rested against his shoulder. She was silent. Her 
 eyes held the mystery of the night as she watched one 
 faintest pin-prick of light in the great violet distance, 
 which was the kitchen window at Morning House. 
 
 In time this light grew brighter and seemed another 
 star, low above the sand-hills and the unseen lagoons. 
 The little skiff altered her course, flying homeward 
 like a bird on the light following breeze. The water 
 chattered beneath her keel with a low, intimate sound.
 
 THE MIST 109 
 
 That was the only one until they entered the narrow 
 channel of the first lagoon, and the reeds brushed the 
 sides of the boat as she turned. A single bird 
 sprang from some hidden nest with a faint chirp, and 
 settled again. Maclear asked in a hushed voice, 
 "Tired, honey?" 
 
 "No." She turned her head so that her eyes 
 rested on him. He saw in them the very poetry of 
 passion. Beyond and behind this tenderness, the in- 
 nocent abandonment of surrender, was a doubt, not 
 of him, but of herself. He did not see it. He per- 
 sisted, his lips close to hers, "Then what 's my girl 
 thinking about?" 
 
 "I was thinkin' about the many times I 've come 
 home to the island, sometimes with Sal, sometimes 
 with Mait, in the rain and in the sun, in the snow and 
 in the cold." There was a fire, a grace in her voice 
 and slight gestures which seemed of the South, as 
 did the sudden fullness and completeness of her love. 
 
 "I was thinkin' that all our lives we're just on 
 the way home, seekin' through the world, over the 
 land, over the water, till we find this." 
 
 She turned closer to him and hid her face on his 
 breast. "Oh, hold me, love," she said, "hold me, 
 an' never let me go! I 'm poor an' common; I 
 ain't fit for you. But I 'm yours. Oh, hold me! 
 It 's like as if I 'd no home now in all the world but 
 here with you."
 
 110 THE BRIDGE 
 
 "Rest in it, my dear," whispered Maclear, huskily. 
 "I '11 hold you and never let you go." 
 
 The little boat swept down another narrow water 
 channel, a winding course paved with increasing 
 stars. In the west they faced still burned a hand's- 
 breadth of the great afterglow. 
 
 After a little, Sombra whispered again: "And I 
 was bein' sorry, Alan, sorry for them that has no 
 home like this of mine. And for them that 's had 
 such a home, dear, and lost it. I was thinkin' of 
 that poor lady." 
 
 Maclear' s arm tightened about her. He said, sud- 
 denly and harshly, "Don't be sorry." 
 
 "I could n't help but be sorry, now that I know 
 what she 's doin' without. Alan, tell me about your 
 brother." 
 
 Maclear was silent. He was facing the fact that 
 he could not. Presently she stirred and looked up at 
 him with wonder. He bent instantly and kissed her. 
 
 "Sombra," he said hurriedly, "not now. Don't 
 let us cloud these days of ours with even the thought 
 of unhappy things." He looked away from her, and 
 again the little boat altered her whispering course 
 under his steady hand. "I want to be happy," he 
 went on, in a breathless voice. "I must be happy. 
 My God, I will be happy!" He looked at her again. 
 And she saw in the starlight that there were tears in 
 his eyes. "Sombra," he finished a little brokenly,
 
 THE MIST 111 
 
 "if you must be sorry for some one, be sorry for me. 
 For I need it very much." 
 
 Moved beyond expression, she clung to him. She 
 said nothing, nor asked another question. She was 
 one of those natures to whom love brings in a day, 
 a week, all ripeness, all wisdom, all fulfilment. She 
 had learned silence; and she was silent now. Only 
 she searched within her young heart to see if there 
 remained a thought or a comfort which was not yet 
 Maclear's, and which she might give him. 
 
 That night Moira knelt a long time at the window 
 of her hotel bedroom. She found a sort of peace in 
 the silence, and in the great height of stars over the 
 lake, whither the sail of Maclear's boat had faded 
 and dwindled with the day. She could not follow 
 him and his in thought to their island of happiness; 
 her bruised heart shrank from that journey. But 
 she was more at rest than she had been for a long 
 time. She had done what she had come to do. If, 
 as at that time often occurred to her, she was not to 
 live very long, she had at least fulfilled the last pos- 
 sible obligation that life could lay on her. 
 
 m 
 
 Maclear's marriage to Sombra made very little 
 change in the life at Morning House. She still 
 cooked and worked for them all. If he made any 
 reference to the time when she would not have to
 
 112 THE BRIDGE 
 
 work, she was shy and troubled. Love, having 
 opened to her the gates of wisdom, now taught her 
 fear. She feared the future, though it was his. 
 
 They had to discuss this future, though each of 
 them was strangely eager to live only in the present. 
 And it was agreed between them, from the first, that 
 when they left Tallis Island, Morning House should 
 be closed. 
 
 Sal would go with them, sooner or later, to the 
 city, and there Maclear would start him in life. He 
 had a great tenderness for the boy, and would have 
 done more than this; but Salvator would take no 
 more from him than the opportunity of work. 
 
 There remained Mail Ransome. 
 
 In those days his personality seemed fading from 
 him; he resembled more and more the house in 
 which he lived, an empty shell resounding only 
 with storms. His hatred had sapped and survived 
 all the rest of his nature. And now Maclear feared 
 that his madness was increasing, though outwardly 
 the old man gave him no real cause for this 
 uneasiness. 
 
 They told him of their marriage. Neither at the 
 time, nor later, did he appear to understand. But 
 he sat for hours when he was alone, repeating over 
 and over to himself those words that held the whole 
 sum of happiness for Maclear: "Married. He 's
 
 THE MIST 113 
 
 married to her." In a little time, had there been 
 any one to listen, he might have been heard whisper- 
 ing: "Married. He 's married to Martha." And as 
 he whispered his great hands closed on the toy yacht 
 he was rigging, so that when he opened them the 
 mimic rigging and the fairy spars fell crushed and 
 tangled on the ground. He was beyond the reach of 
 living voices. To him the woman he loved had just 
 been married to Juan Luz. 
 
 Then Sombra remembered some old friends of her 
 mother's who had a farm on the mainland about 
 thirty miles from the town. In the old days, before 
 Mait had become so crazy, she and Sal had stopped 
 there in the summer. "Kind, nat'ral folk," she said 
 they were, "and their cooking-stove had three ovens." 
 They were not too fortunate. She thought, for a 
 consideration, they would give Mait a kind home if 
 he would agree to go. "And he '11 be better there," 
 she said; "he won't hear the lake in the storms, and 
 maybe he '11 forget about Father at last." 
 
 So to these people Maclear wrote, in his own name 
 and hers. He liked their reply. He arranged a 
 meeting with the farmer in town, and settled the 
 matter then and there. There seemed some quality 
 in Mackerrow, like the quality inherent in a cooking- 
 stove with three ovens, that reassuringly balanced 
 Mail's craziness.
 
 114 THE BRIDGE 
 
 When they told the old man of this arrangement, 
 he acquiesced in all they said. 
 
 They did not hear him, hours afterward, murmur- 
 ing in his darkness: "Martha 's leavin' me. She 's 
 goin' away with Juan Luz." 
 
 This was the last, or all but the last, of Maclear's 
 new cares. When this had been arranged, he gave 
 himself up wholly to happiness. 
 
 With the lovely renewal of his confidence in life 
 that Sombra had brought him, and which was like a 
 renewal of youth, he began to play with life and work 
 as he had never played before. 
 
 All life now came to him in this guise of re- 
 newal, this restoration of things perishing. He be- 
 gan to plan the rescue of little Port Tallis from the 
 sand. 
 
 He told Sombra: "The drift of sand is all from 
 the west. I've been watching the currents in the 
 harbor. If we turned the ledge into a breakwater, 
 and had the harbor on the other side, a dredge for 
 a week in the spring would keep it clear. Then we 'd 
 clear some of the channels, run a line of pipe out into 
 the lake, hide a pumping-station back there among the 
 sand-hills, build some pretty new houses, and we 'd 
 have a town all of our own to play with." 
 
 There spoke the spirit of his land. He went on, 
 "And we 'd have a house of our own here, for the 
 summer." Later, he showed her the place for their
 
 THE MIST 115 
 
 house, an island in an island, a little world of white 
 sand entirely encircled by the broad blue lagoons, 
 and grown with tall poplars; straight columns of 
 leaves now yellowing faintly to the year's change. 
 In the sand he marked out the design of the house, 
 the large rooms, the wide veranda, the separate 
 kitchen quarters. Sombra, who had been watching 
 her god thus shaping a world for her, here asked him 
 solemnly, "Will I have to have help?" 
 
 He laughed at her. "Of course, Mrs. Maclear!" 
 
 She flushed. He called her by that name daily for 
 the delight of seeing the lovely following glow. But 
 she said, "I 'd be dead scared of help." 
 
 "Not you! You '11 be bossing them in no time, as 
 you do me." He went back to his plans in the sand, 
 saying, as he stooped, "And here, at this corner that 
 takes both south and west, shall be your room." 
 
 She said softly, "Ours." 
 
 His eyes worshiped her, but he persisted: "No. 
 Yours only. One room, both in this house and in 
 the house we '11 have in the city, shall be yours only. 
 And it shall be a golden room, Sombra. Walls, 
 hangings, fancy stuff, everything shall be gold. It 
 won't be just a room, you see. It '11 be a type of 
 your golden heart, a shrine for you, My Lady of 
 Comfort. I shall always ask your leave, very hum- 
 bly, before I 'm allowed in. But you '11 open to me 
 when I knock?"
 
 116 THE BRIDGE 
 
 "Husband, is there any place of mine I would n't 
 let you into? Can you think of any door, and me 
 behind it, and not openin' to you?" 
 
 He kissed her hands passionately. But there was 
 some shadow of that dumb trouble in her face which 
 even he was not always able to kiss away. And he 
 kept the hands in his, asking gently, "What is it, 
 child?" 
 
 "Alan, have you a terr'ble lot of money?" 
 
 "No, dear heart. Not a terr'ble lot." 
 
 She flushed again at his mimicry of her way of 
 speaking, tender as it had been. He did not notice 
 it. He repeated his question. Then as she did not 
 answer, said with a little laugh: "Don't you want 
 a house here, Mrs. Maclear? Then you sha'n't have 
 one." 
 
 "It ain't it is n't that. But since you come, I 
 don't want this place changed. Not even changed in 
 a nice way. I would like to keep it the same for- 
 ever." 
 
 "So should I in one way. But change will come 
 in spite of us, honey." 
 
 "Oh, I know. That 's life. Sometimes, since you 
 come, it hurts me. I would like to hold just these 
 days that go so fast, to catch them in my hands as 
 if they was pretty birds, never to let them go. But 
 I can't." 
 
 "I would like that too, Sombra."
 
 THE MIST 117 
 
 She looked at him a little wistfully. "Would 
 you? It 's different for you, dear. You 're a man. 
 You got your work to do. I know, soon, you '11 
 have to go and do it. Me sometimes I wish you 
 could go away and do your work, and then come back 
 to me, and find me waitin' for you here, in the old 
 house among the lagoons, by the old silted harbor, 
 just the same as I am now; and we 'd be just the 
 same together, you an' me." 
 
 He was silent, startled. She had put her finger, 
 as it were, on the one thing which yet shadowed his 
 thought of their future. For he, too, dreaded 
 change, and especially any change which directly 
 affected Sombra. He could not do without her. He 
 could not picture, now, any day or night of his life 
 without her. He longed to possess her every hour. 
 But he longed also to leave her as she was, his golden 
 rose growing in her lovely desolation. He wanted 
 her with him always. Yet he wanted, too, to hold 
 her in some sort apart from life, his secret garden, 
 his fountain sealed, that by his returns to her his 
 life might be perpetually and exquisitely renewed. 
 
 There seemed a disloyalty even in the thought. 
 He put it by, asking with a smile, "Could you do 
 without me like that, honey?" 
 
 A gravity had come on them both. She was pale, 
 and even at a thought of separation tears misted her 
 eyes. But she answered:
 
 118 THE BRIDGE 
 
 "Yes. Yes, Alan, I could, if that way it would be 
 better and happier for you." 
 
 "Well I couldn't get on without you!" 
 
 His voice was rough with emotion. He slid for- 
 ward till he rested on the sand at her feet. She sat 
 erect against the bole of a poplar. He thought she 
 looked like some strong angel at the foot of a pillar; 
 and he and she, and the shaft of light innumerable 
 leaves above them, were shadowed forth in the water 
 below, like a picture caught in a blue jewel. Now, 
 after one of her silences, she leaned over him, gently 
 slid her hand under his chin, and turned his face so 
 that she looked into it. Her eyes met his with that 
 calm look in which, the more utterly she gave her- 
 self, the more utterly she seemed to possess herself. 
 
 She asked gently, "Why?" 
 
 Staring at her, his face whitened. He said, "Can 
 you ask me that?" 
 
 "Yes. Yes, I do ask it. It has been in my mind 
 to ask it, Alan, many a time. Why is it you need 
 me so much?" 
 
 "I love you, Sombra." 
 
 "But I love you more 'n you do me. Yes, yes, I 
 do. I love you so that it seems to me sometimes that 
 I Ve turned into you, that I see things with your eyes, 
 touch them with your hands. And yet, if it was best 
 for you, I could get on without you for a while;
 
 THE MIST 119 
 
 thinkin' of you all the time, waitin' for you, prayin' 
 for you. But you couldn't get on without me a 
 day." 
 
 "I don't believe I could, Sombra." 
 
 "I know as you could n't, Alan. Why?" 
 
 "I love you." 
 
 "It ain't that." 
 
 With a faint smile he asked, "Well, what is it, 
 then?" 
 
 "I don't know. I would like to know. Dear, I 
 know you love me true. But it don't seem in man's 
 nature to hold to me as you do, like you held to me 
 when you come to me in the blowin' sand, and I set 
 my arm round you, and you did not know even who 
 I was, nor love me at all. I would like to know what 
 trouble it was so heavy on you when you come to me 
 that night. I would like to know what troubles you 
 
 now." 
 
 "Nothing troubles me now I have you." 
 There was reproach in her eyes. Maclear looked 
 down at the sand again; he still felt the unspeakable 
 tenderness of her gaze, the protectiveness of her at- 
 titude against the screen of shaking, glittering leaves. 
 "Yes," she said at last, "there is something that 
 troubles you. You can't hide it from me. Why 
 won't you let me share it with you? this thing that 
 makes you "
 
 120 THE BRIDGE 
 
 "Well, child?" he aslqed curiously, hearing 
 !her hesitate for a word. "Something that makes 
 me?" 
 
 "Weak." 
 
 So he had his word. 
 
 He stared at her, amazed. After a minute his 
 face hardened. He said rapidly, "Sombra, you 
 want to help me?" 
 
 "Dear, ain't I are n't I your wife?" 
 
 "You believe what I told you before? that my 
 mistake my fault, if you like was small out of all 
 proportion to the way I 've been made to suffer for 
 it, and may still be made to suffer?" 
 
 "Of course." 
 
 "Then, if you want to help me, if you want to 
 make me happy again, help me to forget. There 's 
 nothing else." 
 
 "Is that the best way, Alan?" 
 
 "It 's the only way for strength, Sombra." 
 
 "Then I '11 help you that way, dear love." 
 
 He knew she would never ask for his confidence 
 again. 
 
 Later he wondered why he had not given it to 
 her, as she would have to know before long. Had it 
 indeed been weakness, or a natural reluctance to 
 cloud these her unforgetable days with his own 
 shadow? He did not know. And they did not 
 speak of it again.
 
 THE MIST 121 
 
 The year, advancing, folded them in day after day 
 of golden haze. The nights were colder. Dawn 
 sometimes found no more than the summits of the 
 highest dunes and the sagging roof of Morning House 
 emerging from a level ocean of fog. The first wind 
 loosened this fog from its anchorages, and it would 
 go silently drifting past all day, riming everything 
 with its own whiteness. Or it would recede to a 
 wall on the horizon, a wall that looked sharp-cut and 
 solid as stone, whence it would descend again in the 
 night, and shut Tallis Island away from the world. 
 The lake was rarely free of mist, in which day and 
 night they heard the bellowing voices of the great 
 grain-tanks, going up empty to the head of the lakes 
 to meet, at the end of the harvest, the outpoured tor- 
 rent of the wheat. 
 
 These days were almost unbearably precious to 
 Maclear; for he never knew when they would end, 
 when Raynham would send for him to return to the 
 city. 
 
 His impatience outran that return, near as he felt 
 it to be. The fancy of that golden room in the city 
 house possessed him, as such fancies do sometimes 
 possess men of a hard-working youth, to whom love 
 comes fully for the first time at thirty. As he used 
 to play with the colored sands of the island in the 
 days of his desolation, so he played with a hundred 
 pretty inventions for that room, which with its closed
 
 122 THE BRIDGE 
 
 door was to symbolize, as no room open to him could 
 do, his absolute possession of Sombra. 
 
 He could not wait. He sent to the city for samples 
 and specimens of wood, silks, carpets, coverings ; lac- 
 quer, amber glass, and yellow pottery. The room 
 was to be all mellow gold for his golden rose of the 
 sands. While he was ordering these things it came 
 to him, with amazement, how few were the gifts he 
 had ever given Sombra: her wedding-ring, a cheap 
 brooch she had fancied, a few other trifles. He was 
 ashamed. Now he ordered beautiful things for her 
 adornment as he ordered them for the unbuilt room. 
 A slender chain of topaz set in gold, a scarf that 
 should 1 be a tissue of gold deepening into russet 
 shadow, one of those sweeping silken gowns women 
 always seemed to find an odd time for wearing, 
 Maclear guessed himself an artist, imagining her 
 beauty. He was happy as a boy, lavishing on her all 
 the tender fancies of his life. 
 
 The goods- arrived in the town at last, and he 
 brought fhem back to the island in the boat. He and 
 Sal unpacked the boxes ki the kitchen that evening, 
 and he spread the samples of parquetry, and heavy 
 silken hangings, and deep-brown lacquer powdered 
 with gold, on the kitchen table with its shabby blue 
 cloth. In the circle of lamplight Sombra and Sal fin- 
 gered these things reverently, and with the same 
 simple wonder. She lifted her eyes to Maclear at
 
 THE MIST 123 
 
 last, and they glowed upon him with the same inno- 
 cence of look. She whispered tremulously, "You 're 
 doin' all this for me?" 
 
 "For whom but you should I do it, Mrs. 
 Maclear?" 
 
 "You 're good to me, Alan. You 're real good to 
 me. But this is too much for what I am." She laid 
 softly back upon, (the table the length of amber- 
 yellow silk she had been holding. The stuff clung to 
 her work-roughened fingers. The slightest cloud, as 
 though of shame, dimmed her brightness. She 
 sighed, "Too much for me." 
 
 In answer he brought the yellow silk gown and 
 laid it in her arms. 
 
 The light was held in its narrow gold embroideries. 
 It was bordered with lace, and beyond this again with 
 fur. She breathed, "For me, too?" 
 
 "Yes. Go and put it on, and show me how lovely 
 you can be." 
 
 She trembled a little and blushed under his eyes. 
 She took it, meekly as Esther might have taken the 
 gifts of her king. She went from the room with it. 
 Maclear showed Sal the earrings which he himself 
 would hang in her sun-browned ears, the chain of 
 topazes which he would wind about that noble throat. 
 Sal fingered the pretty toys in silence. At last he 
 said gently: "She ain't used to things like this. Be 
 patient with her, Alan." But Maclear hardly heard
 
 124 THE BRIDGE 
 
 him. For Sombra had come back, and stood hesi- 
 tating in the doorway. 
 
 He had known she was beautiful. But now, the 
 power and royalty of her beauty held him motionless, 
 and her brother too. The folds of the gracious silk 
 expressed her height, the delicate color caught and 
 increased the golden light that seemed always to rest 
 on her skin, as if it were an essence of the sun that 
 they shared between them. Golden rose she was, and 
 rose of his world. But her head that was carried so 
 high above her poor garments was bent before him. 
 She stood meekly waiting for his approval. 
 
 He roused himself at last from his dream of her 
 beauty, and went to her, the topaz chain in his hand. 
 But in a moment he stopped, with a vexed exclama- 
 tion, a little laugh. "Oh, my dear," he said, "I 'm 
 sorry! I forgot the shoes!" 
 
 Sombra looked down. 
 
 Through a mist she saw them, her ugly shoes, her 
 working shoes, patched and misshapen, scraped bare 
 of blacking by the sand; under the furred and golden 
 hem of the gown they looked ridiculous. And on the 
 sensitiveness of her love, the perceptiveness of her 
 pride delicate beyond any imagining of his that 
 laugh struck like a blow. 
 
 He was laughing at her shabby shoes. 
 
 She turned with a sob, unexpected to her as to 
 him. He saw a flash of golden draperies, the re-
 
 THE MIST 125 
 
 proach of a face as pure as a wounded child's. Then 
 she was gone, and the outer door had closed softly 
 behind her. 
 
 The wild child, thought Maclear, for all her wife- 
 hood. That door had scarcely closed before he had 
 it open, fond words on his lips, his hand outstretched 
 to draw her in. 
 
 But he opened the door on a blind world. His 
 hand closed on nothing but mist. 
 
 While they talked, the mist had enfolded the house, 
 flooding in from the lake, the lagoons, the hidden in- 
 numerable channels of the marsh. It was a sea four 
 fathoms deep. Moon and stars stood free of it, and 
 the taller poplars glittered above its surface. All 
 else was lost and drowned. Into this mist Sombra 
 had fled. 
 
 Maclear, too, went out, closing the door behind 
 him. 
 
 He advanced into that still and silver sea. He felt 
 that he must find Sombra, that he would lose some- 
 thing of her if he let the mist keep her from him even 
 for an hour. She had been but a few minutes gone. 
 But such was the effect of the mist that time and dis- 
 tance were distorted. She seemed to him to be 
 divided from him already by miles, by hours. 
 
 He could just make out her footprints in the damp 
 sand. Each mark was already beaded with moisture. 
 He touched the first one he saw, and was vaguely
 
 126 THE BRIDGE 
 
 shocked to find it so cold. It seemed that any sign 
 she had left for him should be warm. It made him 
 think that she was cold; and he was troubled for her, 
 out in the mist in her thin silken gown. 
 
 He began to call her softly, but the mist returned to 
 him his own voice only; and the sound was strange. 
 Everything was unreal, disguised. He saw trees 
 move in their places, and vapors lift like rocks. 
 Every poplar bush was Sombra, the foolish child, 
 crouching in her golden gown, weeping because he 
 had laughed at her rough shoes. He called again, 
 and heard no answer but the piping of a peewit in 
 the clear moonlit air above the fog. 
 
 He came to the edge of the lake. In their silence 
 the lakes are more dumb than the sea. Not a feather 
 of foam curled by the water's rim. But every now 
 and then this rim advanced and receded a few inches, 
 as though the lake breathed in its sleep. 
 
 Maclear turned from the beach. He had lost her 
 footprints in the stones. He climbed a high dune 
 until his head and shoulders emerged from the 
 strange level mist. He saw it all about, in some 
 places even as ice, in others heaped in enormous and 
 visionary undulations. The sky was clear and cold, 
 the moon brilliant; he saw a night-hawk flutter across 
 the gold disk. He saw nothing else. 
 
 He climbed down the dune and went on, walking 
 in a pearly circle, an impalpable prison not four
 
 THE MIST 127 
 
 feet across. It shut him in, and it shut Sombra out- 
 side. He could not escape it. He began to call 
 her more loudly. He stopped and listened, but 
 could hear nothing but the thud of his own heart. 
 He could not find her, nor she him. 
 
 Perhaps, lost in the mist somewhere, she was 
 afraid; perhaps she was calling him, as he was call- 
 ing her. He looked eagerly for more footprints. 
 His circle of dimness gave him only the sand, the 
 gleam of water, ground willows showing a few fiery 
 leaves, and pods of milkweed spilling a stuff like 
 mist. It hurt Maclear intolerably that she should be 
 calling to him for help, perhaps, for the first time, 
 and that he should not hear. 
 
 Again and again he ran and stretched out his hand 
 to a golden gleam; again and again that hand closed 
 on mist and glittering wet poplar leaves, pointed 
 with rime. Again and again some rustle or faint stir 
 led him knee-deep among the rank sedges and the 
 dripping reeds, only to see an owl rise, to hear a 
 muskrat plunge, or to face his own shadow on the 
 moonlit mist. 
 
 Fears, vague and enormous as the shadows of the 
 fog, possessed him. He saw her fallen into a lagoon 
 in her golden gown among the late golden water- 
 lilies. He saw her running from him, turning to 
 him a face of reproach and fear. He saw her hid- 
 ing from him, unwilling to be found. He knew these
 
 128 THE BRIDGE 
 
 fears for folly. But the fog, his own lostness, and 
 the face he could not see, typified for him, as in a 
 brief strange dream, his life without her. 
 
 "Sombra, Sombra, where are you? Answer me!" 
 
 At last it seemed to him that the silver obscurity 
 faintly replied. 
 
 "Sombra! Love, where are you?" 
 
 He waited, very still. He heard, drawn slowly 
 through the intervening mists, his name. 
 
 "Oh, Alan, dearest, I 'm sorry, sorry, sorry!" 
 
 She had had no other words since she ran to him 
 in the mist, and clung as she had never clung before. 
 
 "Sombra, I felt as if I 'd lost you for good. I 
 could n't find you " 
 
 "Oh, my poor boy! but I 'm sorry." 
 
 "Never run away again, beloved, so that I can't 
 find you." 
 
 "Never, dear, never. Unless " 
 
 "Well, my own girl?" 
 
 "It would do you good for me to run away!" 
 
 "As though it ever could!" 
 
 They laughed softly, there in the white dumb mist, 
 never so dear, each to each. 
 
 "Forgive me, Alan." 
 
 "Me, too, Sombra. I did n't mean to be unkind 
 when I laughed." 
 
 "You was n't unkind. It was me bein' so silly. 
 It only hurt because because "
 
 THE MIST 129 
 
 "What, heart of gold?" 
 
 "Because I 'm far beneath you, Alan." 
 
 He went on his knees, there in the mist, and kissed 
 the clumsy, sandy shoes he had laughed at. 
 
 He said no more to her, nor she to him, as they 
 found their way home together. But that night she 
 woke where she lay beside him, hearing him again 
 call her name. As she listened, there in the dark, she 
 knew that once more in his sleep he lost her, sought 
 her, longed for her with an infinite longing. His 
 soul was bared to her. Awed, she crept to his arms, 
 and those arms closed on her, though he did not wake. 
 She heard the wild beating of his heart, and knew 
 bejyond cjoubt that, from whatever cause, it beat 
 indeed only for her. 
 
 She was only a girl, given to love too young. She 
 had doubted, wondering if she had given too much, 
 or if she could give enough. She doubted no more. 
 The doors of her great heart of compassion opened 
 wide for him. She could give, though she could 
 not understand. And she knew now that he needed 
 all she could give, and more than anything else in 
 the world. 
 
 She began to be perfectly happy. She knew that 
 his need of her would never fail. The knowledge 
 was like a star, above any possible shadowing of the 
 mists, either of death or life.
 
 130 THE BRIDGE 
 
 IV 
 
 Sometimes, in the misty dawns of autumn, Mac- 
 lear borrowed an old bird-gun of Mail's, and went 
 shooting along the interminable reed beds, where 
 sheltered ringneck, bluebill, and whistlewing. In his 
 new-found security was room for a fresh delight 
 each hour. The chill silence of those mornings 
 charmed him, lying hidden by the lagoons under 
 an old tarpaulin, watching the mists heave and ripple 
 away, and the wet dunes glitter in the sudden heat- 
 less sun; the moment when the first string of wild 
 duck arrowed lakeward through the haze, and he 
 sprang erect, careless of how many he scared, and the 
 crack of his shot and the whirling tumble from the 
 sky seemed simultaneous; and he waded thigh-deep, 
 perhaps, to retrieve the pretty limp-necked thing, 
 through bronzing lily-pads, and seed-vessels of the 
 lesser iris, and leaves of arrowhead. Then he 
 would turn homeward in the gradual widening of 
 the world the fog had made so narrow, while day 
 descended on him and his like a dove, whose wings 
 were of silver and her feathers like gold. 
 
 Day after day followed in a timeless course of con- 
 tent. Still no word had come to him from the city. 
 The mist and the lonely miles of blue water seemed 
 like a wall, holding Tallis Island with all upon it as 
 Maclear would fain have held it, apart from the 
 world.
 
 THE MIST 131 
 
 But there came a morning when the mist, rolling 
 off the lake, showed Maclear a small launch sheering 
 through the woolly cloud toward the island. And he 
 knew that some word from his other life was come 
 for him at last. 
 
 Whatever that word should be, he was strong to 
 meet it. Carrying a brace of whistlewings, the dew 
 of their last feeding-ground still on their feathers, he 
 went down to the landing-stage on the lagoon below 
 Morning House, whither the launch was steering. 
 
 On the lagoon the mist yet hung. As Maclear 
 waited on the stage, gun on arm and cloaked in the 
 old tarpaulin, it turned suddenly from white to rose. 
 There was no division between the rosy water and 
 the rosy fog. The little launch, her engines shut off, 
 floated silently the last few yards of her journey, as 
 though borne up in the heart of a cloud. There was 
 a complete silence, like a spell. The two men in her 
 were silent, looking up at Maclear; he was silent, 
 looking down at them. Then one of them stood up 
 and caught the dripping edge of the stage, and drew 
 the launch in. He nodded to Maclear. The other 
 man rose and jumped out on the boards beside him, 
 and said, "Alan." 
 
 It was Raynham. 
 
 They shook hands. They had not seen each other 
 since those last nightmare days in the city. They 
 examined each other in a curious silence. Maclear's
 
 132 THE BRIDGE 
 
 eyes were steady and hard. Raynham's were 
 strangely timid. At last he drew a long breath and 
 looked uncertainly away. He said in a low voice, 
 "You 're lookin' well, Alan." 
 
 "I was never better in my life, Jack." 
 
 Raynham looked at him again. His own face was 
 tired, and showed the effect of strain. There was an 
 odd, startled expression in his eyes that made them 
 for an instant like Moira's eyes. He glanced away 
 again, saying hurriedly: "Yes yes, you 've had a 
 good rest. And more. Mrs. " he stumbled a 
 moment "Mrs. Gordon told me she 'd seen her." 
 
 "Yes, she saw my wife," agreed Maclear. 
 
 "Why did n't you tell us about it, Alan?" asked 
 Raynham, suddenly. 
 
 "I don't know, Jack, unless" Maclear's voice 
 changed "it was on the greedy impulse of keeping 
 the best things all to oneself a while!" 
 
 "Anyway, I congratulate you. Mrs. Gordon said 
 she was very sweet and beautiful. I wish you happi- 
 ness, old fellow. And if I 'm late in wishing it, it 's 
 not my fault." 
 
 Maclear's hand touched his shoulder an instant. 
 "Thanks, Jack," he said; "you wish me no more than 
 I have." 
 
 "No." Again Raynham's look rested on him 
 strangely. "No. I see that I don't." 
 
 "Come up to the house with me. Breakfast will
 
 THE MIST 133 
 
 be about ready, lake-trout, Jack, and you '11 see 
 her," finished Maclear, simply. 
 
 Raynham's eyes warmed. He seized Maclear's 
 hand again and wrung it hard. "Bless you, any- 
 way," he stammered. "I '11 come up to the house 
 with pleasure, but I guess I 'd better not stop for 
 breakfast. I came down by the night train, and I 
 ought to catch an early one back." 
 
 "Did you come to fetch me back with you?" asked 
 Maclear, directly. 
 
 "No. I came to bring you news." He looked 
 round with that odd air of uneasiness, of hesitation. 
 "Where can we talk alone?" 
 
 "Anywhere on the island," said Maclear. 
 
 The mist had cleared. Tallis Island lay bare 
 under the open heavens, a lovely desolation of gleam- 
 ing sand and yellowing poplars, interlaced with 
 a hundred winding waterways. Raynham looked 
 about him curiously, then) at Maclear. He said, 
 "You chose a lonely place, Alan." 
 
 "Yes. I could n't have chosen a better one, 
 though. I owe you a great deal," he went on, facing 
 Raynham, "for carrying on the job, and leaving me 
 here. I owe you everything." 
 
 "Oh, that 's all right," said Raynham, with con- 
 straint, turning away again. 
 
 Maclear said to the man in the launch: "This gen- 
 tleman won't be ready to go back to town yet. Tie
 
 134 THE BRIDGE 
 
 your boat and go up to the house and have your 
 breakfast. Tell the lady I sent you." 
 
 "Right, Mister," said the man, cheerily, looking at 
 Maclear with a frank inquisitiveness. "I know 'em, 
 up to the hotel. I seen her go back and forwards 
 with the ole feller since she was so high." 
 
 He climbed out, tied the launch, and went up to 
 Morning House. Maclear linked his arm in his 
 friend's and drew him along the sandy path beside the 
 lagoon. 
 
 They walked on for a time in silence. Much lay 
 between them that it was difficult to bridge. But the 
 restraint was all on Raynham's side. 
 
 He asked at last, "How 's the business?" 
 
 "Oh! so-so. We 've been havin' trouble with 
 Sayers and Company over the blue-prints. I think it 
 would pay us to fix up a room and do our own. 
 We Ve plenty of power." 
 
 "Well when do you want me back, Jack?" 
 
 "Not till you 're ready to come." Raynham did 
 not look at him. 
 
 "I think I must come soon. I '11 bring my wife 
 with me. We can stay at a boarding-house till we 
 find a home of our own. You '11 send the schooner 
 for us, won't you? It 's just a fancy of mine. 
 She brought me here broken. Let her take me 
 back healed. You 've been a good friend to me, 
 Jack."
 
 THE MIST 135 
 
 "I wonder," said Raynham, just above his breath, 
 and after a long pause, "if I have " 
 
 Maclear scarcely heard. In a little while he 
 asked quietly, "What news of my sister-in-law?" 
 
 "Oh, all right," answered Raynham, in an absent 
 voice. "She 's gone south for her health, as you 
 know." 
 
 "Alone?" 
 
 "No. With my mother and sister." 
 
 "That 's good," said Madeaf, heartily. Again 
 that strange, incredulous look of Raynham's rested 
 on him, but so briefly he was not aware of it. Rayn- 
 ham did not answer. He had his own thoughts, his 
 own hopes. Especially he hoped that after time had 
 a little soothed her Moira might one day give him, if 
 not her love, the right to love her. He asked for no 
 more. And if it ever came, it would not come for 
 years. He kept his lonely hope to himself. 
 
 Suddenly Maclear turned on him and looked at 
 him full. "Jack," he said, "when is the inquiry to 
 be held?" 
 
 With an abrupt movement Raynham swung away 
 from him and went to the edge of the lagoon. He 
 stood there a minute, staring down into the soft shal- 
 low water, where the brown snail-shells crept in the 
 brown sand, among the roots of bur-reed and cat- 
 tail and touch-me-not. His face was white and heavy 
 as. he turned back to Maclear.
 
 136 THE BRIDGE 
 
 "Alan," he said, "there 's not goin' to be any in- 
 quiry." 
 
 They stood facing each other; for a minute they 
 scarcely seemed to breathe. Then Maclear, with an 
 inarticulate exclamation, said unsteadily, "Say that 
 again." 
 
 His hardness and strength seemed transferred to 
 Raynham. Raynham answered at once: "The in- 
 quiry, to the best of my belief, is shelved." 
 
 After a time Maclear whispered, "How?" 
 
 Raynham looked away. He asked harshly, "Do 
 you remember what papers they were that pressed for 
 the inquiry?" 
 
 "No." ' 
 
 "They were the 'Morning Leader,' and the 
 'Echo,' and the 'City News.' " 
 
 "All owned by Ducroix?" 
 
 "Exactly. All owned, and their policy dictated, 
 by one man." 
 
 "Well?" But Maclear knew. 
 
 "I tried to buy Ducroix off Do you want all the 
 dirty details?" asked Raynham, almost savagely. 
 
 "No. No, Jack, no!" And Maclear's voice was 
 almost a cry of appeal. 
 
 "I could n't offer him a big enough price. But you 
 can't knock around with the same men in the same 
 city all your life without hearing things about every 
 one of 'em. I knew things about Ducroix and the
 
 THE MIST 137 
 
 election five years ago at Rochard Bay. I found a 
 man who knew more than I did. I could n't buy 
 Ducroix or his rags, but I bought him. I told 
 Ducroix that if he did n't drop the question of the 
 inquiry, and, what was more, withdraw all he 'd said, 
 I 'd take my man to Bassett of the 'Clarion' and let 
 him tell his little tale and show his proofs, too. And 
 then, I said, 'How about it?' Ducroix climbed right 
 down. Had to. I 've the papers in my pocket, if 
 you want to see how thorough it is." 
 
 "No." To himself Maclear was repeating words 
 that had a familiar sound: "It's done every day, 
 after all." 
 
 Raynham was silent, gazing grimly at the golden 
 poplar spires mirrored in the lagoon. Maclear 
 gazed too. Neither saw the beauty of the world. 
 Between it and them a mist had risen. 
 
 Maclear said at last, "Then, there 's nothing " 
 
 "There 's nothing," agreed Raynham, in a low 
 voice, "for you to fear." 
 
 "Thanks to you." 
 
 There was no answer. And that silence showed 
 Maclear what his friend had done for him, and at 
 what cost. He was suddenly and incredibly hurt by 
 the knowledge. Moira's grief had not moved him 
 in any degree like this. He said roughly: "Fear? 
 Fear? By God, Jack, I wish you 'd left it alone, 
 let them bring an inquiry if they 'd wanted to!" He
 
 138 THE BRIDGE 
 
 hesitated a moment; for how much did Jack know? 
 Then he finished through his teeth, "I could have 
 faced it." 
 
 And at the word a white face he hardly knew for 
 Raynham's was looking into his own. He felt Rayn- 
 ham's hand shake on his wrist. 
 
 "Yes," said Raynham, very low, "you could face 
 it. God knows how. But I could n't." 
 
 "What do you mean, Jack?" asked Maclear 
 quickly. 
 
 "An inquiry on oath? Think. I might have had 
 to be a witness against you." 
 
 After a while Maclear said, "Then you Ve known 
 all along?" 
 
 "All along. I 'd nothing to go on, of course. I 
 just knew." 
 
 "And all along you Ve stood by me like this?" 
 
 "I was so dammed sorry for you," explained Rayn- 
 ham, wearily. "Do you understand?" 
 
 "I understand what you Ve done for me a thing 
 you hate. After all, it 's done every day." 
 
 Maclear had not meant to say this. The words 
 came unawares, as if something stronger than him- 
 self had spoken with his lips. And Raynham turned 
 with a gesture of revolt. 
 
 "This kind of thing it's been done too often 
 by one of us, anyway. And it was always a case
 
 THE MIST 139 
 
 of follow-my-leader with me, even when we were at 
 school." 
 
 "Have you come to quarrel with me now?" 
 
 "No," said Raynham after a pause, "for I 'm 
 still damned sorry for you." 
 
 Maclear looked at Raynham's averted face curi- 
 ously. There was something inexplicable in this 
 compassion, something that had not been there in 
 those black days in the city. Raynham seemed, in 
 some extraordinary way, sorrier for him now than he 
 had been then. A spark of resentment burned at the 
 back of Maclear's mind. They meant well. They 
 all meant well; but if only they 'd let him forget! if 
 only they would not perpetually remind him, with 
 tlheir forgiveness, by their conscious loyalty, that 
 there was anything to forgive or to endure! 
 
 He could have faced the inquiry. He smiled as 
 the realization of his own strength and his own se- 
 curity swept over him. He said quietly: "Well 
 what 's done is done. Send the old Marline for me 
 when you get back. And then you 'd better go for 
 a holiday yourself. You 're looking used up. You 
 need a rest. Nothing like a rest to show a man the 
 the rights of things. When you get back we '11 
 start over again, Jack, as though all this had never 
 been." 
 
 His voice sank. For a minute the sense of what
 
 140 THE BRIDGE 
 
 had been rose like a wave, and the deep waters of 
 remembrance went over him. He set his teeth and 
 endured it; such moments must come. There was no 
 sound but the long inextinguishable sigh of the reeds. 
 
 "There was something else I came to tell you." 
 
 "Well, Jack?" 
 
 "Gorings and Willett have offered me a post. I 
 would like to accept it as early next year as you can 
 fill my place." 
 
 After a long silence Maclear asked, rather breath- 
 lessly, "Do 1 you mean you 're going to quit me?" 
 
 Raynham nodded slowly, staring over the blue 
 water with unseeing eyes. There was a tired finality 
 about him that held Maclear dumb. He knew Jack 
 had made up his mind. 
 
 He asked curtly, "Do you feel like giving me your 
 reasons?" 
 
 "You would n't appreciate them." 
 
 "Very well." Maclear's hard pride was on fire. 
 "I won't ask you for them. But after all these 
 years!" 
 
 "I know." Raynham's voice was gentle, infinitely 
 sad. "It seems queer. You know it ain't the 
 money. As a matter of fact, I '11 get less with 
 them." He looked at Maclear wistfully. "It 's not 
 as if you needed me, Alan," he said. "I would 
 never quit you while you needed me. But you don't. 
 You can get along without me."
 
 THE MIST 141 
 
 "I guess I can." 
 
 Raynham looked at him again, wonderingly. 
 And again he nodded to himself. "Yes," he 
 said, to himself, "it 's that way with you." Then, 
 aloud: "Well, I guess I '11 be getting back. I '11 send 
 the schooner for you pretty soon, but there's no 
 hurry." 
 
 He turned, and silently they walked back to the 
 launch. Maclear did not again ask Raynham to go 
 to the house; and Raynham, his errand done, seemed 
 eager to get away. Maclear felt that their comrade- 
 ship was drawing to a close; that never again would 
 things be as they had been between himself and Rayn 
 ham. Raynham was swayed by motives to which he 
 had lost the clue, emotions he did not share; his 
 security and happiness served in some strange way to 
 separate him from Raynham as they had from 
 Moira. 
 
 But he was so safe he did not greatly care. Only, 
 as they waited on the wharf till the launch should 
 start, he touched Raynham's shoulder. 
 
 "Jack," he whispered, "why ?" 
 
 "Is it possible," said Raynham, sadly, "that you 
 don't understand?" 
 
 "If you 've known all along I don't see why 
 you should want to quit me now." 
 
 "Don't you? I knew you both, Alan. I loved 
 you both. And it just breaks my heart to see you.' 9
 
 142 THE BRIDGE 
 
 The man came down from Morning House at a run, 
 wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. He cast 
 off the rope and started the engine. Raynham 
 sprang in. He did not say anything more, nor did 
 Maclear. 
 
 A shadow was on Maclear for a moment, like a 
 mist across his sun. He was still groping for that 
 clue, that lost key-note, when the launch was no more 
 than a speck out on the lake. He walked slowly 
 back to Morning House, hurt, angry, and supremely 
 puzzled. Why should any man stick to another in 
 trouble and desert him in security? 
 
 At the head of the veranda steps Sombra was wait- 
 ing for him. Seeing her, he quickened his pace. 
 The doubt and the shadow passed. Let them all go. 
 He was safe. He was secure. He saw her like the 
 very future itself, sunlit, strong, fruitful; behind her, 
 like the past wreckage of his own life, was the ruin of 
 Morning House. But he need think of it never again. 
 
 Their faces were to the sun. He could never lose 
 her. God! how safe he was! 
 
 Day after day, the great companies of birds passed 
 over Tallis Island, flying south. 
 
 There was no other sign of the waiting winter. 
 The weather was warm and still. The brazen shafts
 
 THE MIST 143 
 
 of the poplars, the burning torches of the ground 
 willows, were reflected unshaken in the blue lagoons; 
 they seemed, in their splendor, to be waiting for 
 another consummation like that of their spring, not 
 for decay. 
 
 But to the mysterious communal senses of the 
 birds a summons had come. Something had stirred 
 in the North. Something had called in the South. 
 They listened and followed in hundreds and thou- 
 sands, kinglets, tanagers, bobolinks, whitethroats, 
 sheathed in dull feathers for this flight. One day 
 the island was full of their voices, also grown strange 
 and songless; the next, they were gone, and another 
 company had taken their place. 
 
 The big blue-shouldered swallows that Sombra 
 loved had gone early and silently from the sand- 
 hills. But the little black-and-white ones gathered 
 along the marshes, filled the air for four days with 
 their bubbling chatter; on the fifth, as at a signal, 
 lifted and wheeled above the island, leveled, and 
 were gone also. Sombra, watching them go, felt that 
 they took with them the blossom of the year. 
 
 In a little while there seemed no birds left living 
 on Tallis Island but the herring-gulls, a few crows, 
 and the great horned owl which they saw sometimes 
 hawking silently along the lagoons, the spirit of in- 
 satiable hunger in noiseless feathers. And at night 
 the tremendous starlit spaces above the mists were
 
 144 THE BRIDGE 
 
 threaded through with the tiny traveling-calls of the 
 thistle-birds. 
 
 Sombra, listening at the door of the house to 
 these faint heroic pipings in the void, felt tears sud- 
 denly in her eyes. She was moved to the deepest 
 springs of her awakening nature; in her soul, also, 
 she seemed to hear the echo of little voices, lost, wan- 
 dering in the night. She felt as though the arms of 
 her spirit were great enough, tender enough, to fold 
 all the small homeless things of creation, to draw 
 them down to her, to make them hers. 
 
 She turned to Maclear, saying softly, "Oh, the 
 poor little birds!" 
 
 "They '11 reach the South, all right." 
 
 "Not all." For the first time she thought of those, 
 the little ones, the weak ones, who would fall by 
 the way. 
 
 He had been standing on the step behind her, in 
 the lighted doorway. Now he came down to her, 
 and put his arm about her. They stood together, 
 their faces upturned, listening to those faint cryings 
 in the night, the voices of life, feeble, mysterious, 
 irresistible. 
 
 When her voice again reached him it was a 
 whisper, a breath of the night: 
 
 "They 're goin', like the minutes, the hours of 
 this summer. Once do you remember, Alan? I 
 said I would like to keep them, to hold them in my
 
 THE MIST 145 
 
 hands, so the time -would never go. I can't do that. 
 But" 
 
 "Well, dear heart?" 
 
 He felt her strong life thrill within his arm. But 
 her voice was like the lost, whispering voices 
 of the traveling birds as she said, "Those hours, those 
 minutes, they was lovely to me." 
 
 "And to me." 
 
 "They 're goin', goin'. But maybe they 're leavin' 
 somethin' behind for us somethin' lovelier than 
 them." 
 
 It was her pride that at last made him understand. 
 But when he would have spoken she turned and laid 
 her warm young hand across his lips. "Oh, my dear 
 love," she said, "don't speak. There 's nothing left 
 to be said between us two. For you 're to be the 
 father o' my little child." 
 
 Lost in darkness, the golden birds passed over 
 them, crying to one another. And Mait Ransome, 
 who had been standing behind them in the open door- 
 way, turned back into the room and went to his place. 
 
 Salvator asked, "Is Sombra out there yet?" 
 
 After a long time Mait replied, "Aye, she's out 
 there, talkin' to Juan " 
 
 Maclear's first feeling, perhaps, was one of an 
 additional security, a possessiveness nothing could 
 question; more than when he loved her, more than 
 when he married her, she was his.
 
 146 THE BRIDGE 
 
 VI 
 
 The soft darkness closed around Morning House, 
 concealing all that day revealed. When the lights 
 within its wall went out one by one, there seemed no 
 division between the house and its surroundings; the 
 mist lay along its passages as it lay along the lagoon 
 channels; the air within its rooms was heavy with 
 the chill, sweet marsh smell; the faint incessant 
 whispers of its decaying fabric were one with the 
 voices of the water, fingering along miles and miles 
 of lonely and tideless sands. 
 
 Later, the moon rose; but the mist was compassion- 
 ate as the dark had been to Morning House. Its 
 rows of empty rooms were featureless and peaceful; 
 filled with strands and webs of fog, they seemed im- 
 personal as the hollows of the dunes. Morning 
 House slept with the substance of the island into 
 which it was resolving year by year. 
 
 But an hour or two passed, and something woke 
 within the house. It was something mighty and yet 
 imponderable, enclosed in an old man's body. It 
 filled every passage, every room. The walls of 
 Morning House seemed distended, ready to break, 
 with the pressure of that which was within it. 
 
 That spirit reached out to Maclear's, even in his 
 sleep, and woke him. 
 
 At first he thought it was Sombra who had called
 
 THE MIST 147 
 
 him. But she was asleep still. He lay and listened 
 and stared at the twilight of the moon. He heard 
 nothing, he saw nothing. Yet in a little while he 
 rose, pulled on a few clothes, opened the door, and 
 slipped silently from the room. 
 
 Outside stretched the long decaying passage, 
 bleak and bare with its rows of unused doors. It 
 was full of luminous mist, and as this mist lifted 
 and sank, the doors and the walls seemed to extend 
 and shrink alternately, with a small movement like a 
 pulsation. It was as if Morning House throbbed with 
 fear. 
 
 Maclear saw no one. Yet he knew some one had 
 just passed down the empty passage. He walked 
 quickly to the end, where it gave on another. And 
 as he went the mist again worked its impalpable 
 magic. In a moment it had separated him from 
 Sombra. He felt that he would have to grope his 
 way back through immense obstacles of time and 
 place, though their room was but just behind him. 
 
 Half-way down the second passage, a shadow 
 moved. The moonlight, strained through softest in- 
 tervening fleeces, played with the shape of that 
 shadow; now it was vague as a cloud, again, sub- 
 stantial as a man. Maclear knew it for Mait Ran- 
 some. 
 
 Standing at the corner of the wall, he watched. 
 He heard a soft sound. Mait was knocking gently
 
 148 THE BRIDGE 
 
 at the door of one of those unused ruinous rooms. 
 He heard a soft whisper, clear enough to claim the 
 attention of a drowsing man, light enough not to 
 awaken a man who slept sound: 
 
 "Be you sleepin', Juan Luz?" 
 
 Noiseless in his hare feet, Maclear followed. 
 That spirit darkly housed in Mail's flesh drew him 
 in its wake as a leaf is drawn by the wind. His 
 breath was cold in his mouth. The man to whom 
 Mail Ransome whispered had slept sound for nearly 
 twenty years. 
 
 The old man shuffled on, paused at another door, 
 and softly knocked. Waiting for his answer, he 
 leaned his head to the crack, and listened as though 
 for the breathing of a man asleep. Then he passed 
 on to a third door. 
 
 "Be you asleep, Juan?" 
 
 Over this door he passed his hand, with a whisper- 
 ing sound like his voice. This door had a rusty 
 latch, and he found and pressed it. The door 
 yielded with a creak. It gave inch by inch unwill- 
 ingly, like a living thing on guard. Mait entered 
 the room. Such was the conspiracy between his 
 spirit and these rotting substances that Maclear lis- 
 tened for a noise, a voice, a cry. He heard only the 
 sound of the old man's hands traveling over the 
 walls of the empty room, and his tread retreating 
 from the door and again returning to it.
 
 THE MIST 149 
 
 Down the whole length of that passage Mail 
 knocked at the doors and listened, and spoke to the 
 dead. And Maclear had an apprehension of some 
 presence that waited behind all the doors, and, at 
 the right time, would reply. The house was packed 
 from wall to wall with a tremendous intentness which 
 had neither eyes nor ears, and needed none. 
 
 When Mait came to the end of the second passage, 
 Maclear was by his side. But the old man was quite 
 unaware of him. And Maclear dared not, by word 
 or touch, divert that haunted spirit. He followed in 
 silence, feeling his own personality strangely recede 
 from him, sucked into that far past which was the 
 living present to Mait Ransome. He felt himself 
 the ghost, Juan Luz the reality, and half waited for 
 the dead to answer. 
 
 "Where be you, Juan Luz?" 
 
 The passage ended in a blank wall. The old man 
 leaned his head here, and his hands moved blindly 
 on each side of him. The breath of a voice came 
 from his lips, moaning and unmeaning sounds that 
 shaped themselves gradually to speech. "I can't 
 find ye, Juan," Maclear heard. And then, "The 
 deep water, the deep water." And once more: 
 "Martha, Martha, ye 've given me nothing, though 
 I Ve served ye seven years like Jacob. But ye '11 
 give this come-by-night a child." 
 
 Then Maclear knew what storm it was that had
 
 150 THE BRIDGE 
 
 driven Mail into his madness on this calm, night. 
 Presently the old man turned from the wall, still 
 with that ghostly sobbing-out of wrong, and went 
 past Maclear, and back along the passage once more. 
 Maclear followed him. 
 
 He moved now more swiftly, and did not pause at 
 any door. He led Maclear up the broken stairs to 
 the second story. This was more ruinous than the 
 lower one. But Maclear came here sometimes, for 
 here Salvator had his room. 
 
 Mail Ransome advanced swiftly along the upper 
 hall. The roof here and there opened on moonlit 
 mist, through which a few stars shone blurred. The 
 flooring gaped here and there on blackness. Mail 
 avoided these places. He moved now quicker and 
 quicker, as though he could see. Maclear followed. 
 The intentness of Morning House had reached a 
 cracking-point. He was aware of a dumb, intoler- 
 able strain, a great loneliness. 
 
 He was glad when a distant sound from without 
 drawled to him through miles of intervening fog; he 
 knew it for the hand-siren of a sailing-ship far out 
 on the lake; he was less lonely by just so much as 
 that sound, which was presently repeated. 
 
 Mait Ransome was going slower now, hesitating 
 before the doors. Black openings gaped in many 
 places, where the doors had been burned for firewood.
 
 THE MIST 151 
 
 Again and again he paused, listened, advanced. He 
 did not knock. 
 
 He stood at last outside the door behind which 
 Salvator lay. 
 
 Maclear did not know that to this very room Juan 
 Luz had been carried on the night of the wreck. 
 The walls knew it, the rotting floor remembered, the 
 roof proclaimed it, but their voices were silence to 
 him. 
 
 Mail Ransome began to knock at the door. 
 
 The sound at first was all but inaudible; it seemed 
 a tremor in the substance of the house and of the 
 mist that filled it. Then it grew louder, more insis- 
 tent. 
 
 There was a stir within the room. 
 
 Maclear knew it was Salvator who moved. Yet 
 for a moment it seemed to him that Mail had been 
 knocking at the door of a grave, and that the dead had 
 heard. 
 
 All was still, except for the muffled and distant 
 sound of the ship's fog-Jiorn far out on the lake. 
 Morning House seemed ready to crack asunder in the 
 stillness. 
 
 Then the door opened and Salvator stood before 
 Mait. 
 
 He too was sucked like a leaf in the wind of that 
 spirit. Even in his sleep he could not escape it.
 
 152 THE BRIDGE 
 
 All his life, all his dreams, had been commanded by 
 one event, one dread, the dread and event of an 
 old man's madness. 
 
 The mist laid its spell upon them all. It seemed 
 to divide Maclear from those others, as from Sombra, 
 by a great space of time or distance. He felt as 
 though he were looking at a repetition of something 
 that had happened years and years ago; a visible 
 flriemory; a reincarnated hate. Across that gi'eat 
 gulf he watched, motionless, the motion of shadows. 
 
 Salvator appeared to walk in a dream. His wide 
 eyes were fixed on Ma it with an inhuman intensity 
 of Dear. That look was stamped on his face as 
 though the fair young flesh had been formed only 
 to shadow it forth. His left hand was raised as if 
 in defense, his right was hidden. 
 
 Suddenly Maclear's attention was riveted on that 
 hidden right hand. He advanced softly toward the 
 two figures. 
 
 As he moved Mait also began to move, with his 
 motion exaggerated by the mist, inch by inch toward 
 Salvator. And as he advanced, the boy went inch by 
 inch to meet him, as though this bodily action of 
 Mail's was reflected from his body as the look on 
 Mail's face was reflected from his face. They were 
 like two slraws approaching each other in a pool, 
 and were drawn togelher by an equally irresislible 
 force.
 
 THE MIST 153 
 
 It had all happened years and years before, 
 thought Maclear. 
 
 Then, without warning, the boy screamed and 
 struck. 
 
 Some sense in Maclear had outrun the event. Be- 
 fore Salvator's right hand fell, Maclear was there, 
 and had caught his wrist. As he leaped forward he 
 shouted, a great healthy shout that shattered the 
 intolerable attentiveness of Morning House as glass 
 cracks at a blow. 
 
 For a minute he had all he could do to hold Sal. 
 The boy's face was inhuman, his strength inhuman. 
 At last Maclear mastered that right arm, drew it 
 down and gripped it, forced open the fingers, waited 
 for the clatter of a knife on the boards. 
 
 Nothing fell. The hand was empty. 
 
 Maclear pinned Salvator against the wall, staring 
 into his face, which was slowly changing. So 
 strong had been the illusion that Maclear could have 
 sworn to the flash of a long blade in that hand when it 
 flew up. But that also had been a dream. 
 
 He waited quietly. At last, without speaking, he 
 released the boy. It was as if Salvator had but 
 now awakened. He leaned back against the wall, 
 shaking from head to foot. Maclear laid a hand 
 on his shoulder. He said in a low voice, "It was 
 only a dream, Sal." 
 
 Black horror looked from the young eyes into
 
 154 THE BRIDGE 
 
 his own, horror and a shadow of fate. "It 's a 
 dream I '11 never escape!" whispered the boy. He 
 hid his face in his hands and began to sob. 
 
 It had happened very quickly. Maclear left him 
 and went to Mail Ransome, who was groping vaguely 
 about the doorway. He said, in a matter-of-fact 
 tone: "I think you 've missed your way about the 
 house, Mr. Ransome. This is not the way to your 
 room." 
 
 The dream was shattered. For that time the spirit 
 had fled. It was only a crazy old man who answered, 
 mildly and wanderingly: "Well, you don't say so! 
 I don't rightly remember how I happened to come 
 here, but I ain't where I meant to be, that 's straight. 
 Well, now, ain't that queer? And where is my room, 
 sir?" 
 
 "I '11 take you to it." 
 
 He did so. When he returned, he found Sal's 
 room and the passage empty. He went back to his 
 own room. 
 
 But he did not go in. 
 
 The room was faintly moonlit. Sombra still slept. 
 No echo of fear or hate had called her in her sleep. 
 She had not waked. But she had moved. 
 
 Sal was kneeling by the side of the bed, his face 
 hidden. He had not awakened her. But as though 
 mysteriously aware of his need, through some awak- 
 ening sense within herself, she had stretched out her
 
 THE MIST 155 
 
 arm and encircled him in it, as a mother encloses a 
 child from harm. 
 
 Maclear went softly away for awhile. He felt 
 that even he had not the right to enter. Not for the 
 first time he felt himself a stranger, outside whatever 
 fate it was that bound so closely together the sister 
 and brother. 
 
 When he stole back, Salvator was gone, though 
 Sombra still slept with her hand curved protectively 
 about emptiness. Maclear kissed the arm where that 
 wild head had rested. 
 
 The moon set. Once again the darkness withdrew 
 Morning House into its own mercy. 
 
 The dawn came like any other dawn in the mist. 
 
 They learned that Mail had come down early, 
 cooked his own breakfast, taken a sack, and gone to 
 gather driftwood along the beaches. 
 
 The event of the night had left Maclear uneasy, 
 full of a foreboding huge and vague as the fog. He 
 did not voice it when he said, "He '11 get lost or fall 
 into the water." 
 
 Sombra said pitifully, for the old man who had 
 hardly ever given her even a word of kindness: "You 
 forget. Dark and light, fog and clear, it's all one 
 to Mail." 
 
 "Yes," he agreed. "I forgot." But he waited 
 for Mail's return, and was troubled when he did 
 not come. Later, they too went out.
 
 156 THE BRIDGE 
 
 vn 
 
 Out on the lake the Marline Messier lay becalmed. 
 
 Under the moon, in the mist, she had moved like 
 a wraith. When the moon set, the mist took her, re- 
 solved her into itself. She almost ceased to exist. 
 Only her worn gray topsails stood clear of it, and 
 blotted out the stars. 
 
 Leaning over the side, Garroch could hear but 
 the faintest ghostly voice of water. He could see 
 nothing. The schooner's lights were blurred by the 
 mist; distance was so lost that they might have hung 
 among the half-seen stars. 
 
 Now and then the noise of her old siren jarred 
 through the voiceless quiet, but no ship replied. It 
 was as though she floated outside the world, outside 
 life, to some nameless harbor of a shadowy sea. 
 
 Garroch hummed softly to himself. The rime 
 beaded his gray eyelashes, made him cough. He 
 lifted his hand unconsciously every now and then to 
 brush it away. He wondered what was the sense in 
 keeping a watch when a man could see nothing. 
 And his ears were not so good as they had been. 
 
 Later, he went to the hatch and called. A sleepy 
 murmur answered him. 
 
 "Come up here, Ian." 
 
 In a minute his nephew joined him, a drowsy-eyed,
 
 THE MIST 157 
 
 white-haired boy from the Scotch Townships. Gar- 
 roch said, "Stand here on the deck an' listen." 
 
 "I 'm listeninV 
 
 "D 'ye hear anything?" 
 
 "Seems like almost engines." 
 
 "Stand here. Well?" 
 
 "I don't hear nothin'." 
 
 Garroch said, "It 's the fog. I thought I heard 
 engines, too, but the sound comes and goes." He 
 melted away into the mist forward, and presently the 
 little fog-horn bleated like a lost sheep, and bleated 
 again. There was no reply. Impossible to say how 
 far the noise would travel on such a night. The boy 
 stayed where he was, awake now, and shivering in 
 the chill, trying to pierce the white darkness with his 
 young vision. 
 
 By and by he called sharply, "Uncle!" 
 
 "Aye, Ian?" 
 
 "I have the sound now. It 's closer." 
 
 Garroch ran back and joined him. He said, "I 
 don't hear it." 
 
 "It 's gone again. Just as if there was a door 
 openin' and shuttin'." 
 
 "It 's the fog. I 've known it before like this." 
 
 "There!" 
 
 "Aye, I heard it then, Within a half-mile, I 
 reckon. But there 's no tellin'."
 
 158 THE BRIDGE 
 
 He disappeared once more, and the fog-horn 
 wheezed and bleated; but the night returned no 
 answer. The boy followed him, his bare feet patter- 
 ing along the wet deck. Between blasts of the siren, 
 they both listened; they heard the drip of moisture 
 falling from the standing rigging; the blood ham- 
 mered in their ears; they thought the; hollows of the 
 fog gave back, as it were, an echo of this drumming. 
 
 Suddenly Ian shouted again, "There!" 
 
 The mysterious doors of the mist had opened. 
 They heard the beat of engines plainly. Garroch 
 said, "If we could but get some way on her! 
 They 're very near. They 're " 
 
 "Right on us!" screamed the boy. 
 
 As though some solid intervening substance had 
 been at that instant withdrawn, they heard the en- 
 gines, -saw a red light and a green one, like little 
 balls of colored wool in the *fog, bearing straight 
 down on the Marline's starboard quarter. They 
 jumped to the side and shouted wildly. They heard 
 a shout in answer; the beat of the engines altered, 
 slowed; a little the lights changed line. They 
 waited. Garroch said aloud, "They can't clear us." 
 
 The boy sobbed with suspense and excitement. 
 
 Then a shadowy gleaming bow struck the 
 schooner, with a gentle thrusting motion, just abaft 
 the mizzen chains. She heeled over to port. The 
 steamer's bows, coming round, scraped slowly along
 
 THE MIST 159 
 
 her side and the two vessels ground their length to- 
 gether, surged on with a strange effect of leisureli- 
 ness, and as slowly separated. The tug it was a 
 fishing-tug backed away, and immediately vanished 
 into the mist. The Marline swung and settled her- 
 self once more on a level keel. 
 
 A strange voice, extraordinarily near, though the 
 speaker was invisible, drawled through the fog, 
 "That was a close call!" 
 
 "Too close. Did n't you hear our siren, sonny?" 
 
 "Thought it was miles away. Say, you all right?" 
 
 "Guess so." 
 
 "So are we, I guess. Better have a look at that 
 old scow of yours. I '11 stand by a while if you 
 like." 
 
 "No need," answered Garroch, rather indignantly; 
 "she 's all right." 
 
 "Sure?" 
 
 "Sure." 
 
 "I '11 get on, then. So long!" 
 
 "So long! Say, you aboard the tug!" 
 
 "Hello!" 
 
 "Don't you go rammin' Tallis Island in the dark, 
 scootin' about like you was an automobile!" 
 
 Dim laughter answered from the invisible tug. 
 They heard the ting of a little bell in the mist, the 
 beat of the sturdy engines slowly receding. Presently 
 they were left to silence again, save for their own
 
 160 THE BRIDGE 
 
 voices. At the collision the other men had come up 
 on deck and they now stood yawning and questioning 
 Garroch. 
 
 The old man's nerve had been a little shaken. He 
 told the event garrulously. Ian said nothing. He 
 was still listening, aware of an uneasy stir, some- 
 where in the misty world, between a vibration and a 
 sound. 
 
 By and by he stooped and laid his hand flat on the 
 deck. The smallest tremor was running through the 
 wood, as though the Marline were sailing on a light 
 wind. He knelt, and laid both hands to the deck. 
 He felt that it was rising ever so little to port. 
 
 "What 's wrong with you, boy?" asked Garroch, 
 impatiently, seeing his crouching figure. 
 
 Ian did not answer. He jumped up and ran to 
 the side. Standing on the bulwarks, he caught the 
 shrouds and leaned far out. 
 
 A glimmer of water under the mist 
 
 The boy's eyes pierced the haze. Suddenly he 
 leaped back on the deck and shouted hoarsely. 
 
 "She 's goin' down!" he screamed. "She 's go in* 
 down under us! She's goin' down all standin'!" 
 
 A moment's utter silence. Then, "What? What 's 
 he say?" 
 
 "Sinkin' under us?" 
 
 Two or three shadows plunged to the side, and 
 leaned out as Ian had done. One jumped back with
 
 THE MIST 161 
 
 a frightened oath. "Settlin'!" he stammered. 
 "She 's settlin' under our feet! She 's almost awash 
 now! Boys, I could 'a' set my feet in the boat!" 
 
 There was another silence, then an inarticulate 
 shouting; one shouted that it was nonsense, another 
 bawled after the tug; in a moment they were all say- 
 ing one thing: "The boat! Let 's take to the boat!" 
 
 They hesitated. The quietness was so great they 
 could not believe their own danger. But as they 
 paused, the deck under their feet seemed to give an 
 uneasy shudder. The Marline dipped to starboard, 
 swung slowly back, dipped again. A trickle of 
 dark water slid over the deck from one side to the 
 other. 
 
 They yelped and ran, shaken by the silence and the 
 mist. 
 
 The boat had been towing astern. The collision 
 had driven it round under the port quarter. They 
 dropped into it one by one, talking in low, scared 
 whispers. 
 
 "Been on the lakes forty years. Never knowed 
 the like!" 
 
 "The boss '11 be real mad. He was set on the 
 old ship." 
 
 "Got the sculls, Levett?" 
 
 "Aye, aye. Shove off, there. Quick! She's 
 droppin' like a stone." 
 
 "Where 's that darned tug?"
 
 162 THE BRIDGE 
 
 The last voice ran up and cracked. Another 
 asked, "What is it, anyway?" 
 
 "Must have ripped the old planks clean out of 
 her, like they was paper." 
 
 "Pull, boys! Get clear. Feel that? There's a 
 wind behind the fog." 
 
 The sculls splashed flurriedly. They pulled away, 
 chattering nervously, as near on the course taken by 
 the tug as they could guess it. They shouted, but 
 there was no reply. In a minute, looking back, no 
 man could see the old Martine, nor say where she 
 had been. 
 
 In a little while, toward dawn, a wind began to 
 press upon the mist, and the vapor began to flow like 
 water, like a river, interminably. The schooner's 
 soft gray topsails darkened against the paling sky; 
 they filled; her rigging creaked; water-logged, she 
 drifted forward under the last stars. 
 
 She kept afloat until day. Then, as if the winds 
 and the lake were consciously gentle with her, the 
 beautiful old forsaken thing, she went ashore softly, 
 all sails standing, on the sands beyond the ledge of 
 Tallis Island, where a fruit-boat from the Floridas 
 had been wrecked twenty years before. 
 
 All about her the mist changed to pearl, to a silver 
 and silent tide flowing past without ceasing. It did 
 not lift with the day.
 
 THE MIST 163 
 
 VIII 
 
 Sombra was walking homeward with Maclear 
 along the marshes. He carried an armful of drift- 
 wood ; she, one of flowers and leaves, silvery yellow 
 aspen leaves, blotched with black, scarlet ground 
 willow, late goldenrod, and purple asters. Leaves, 
 blossoms, and stems were covered by the mist with 
 an infinity of smallest pearls. 
 
 Their hair, their eyebrows, even their eyelashes 
 were whitened with the mist. Looking at Maclear, 
 Sombra laughed. "Now we know what we '11 look 
 like when we 're old," she said. Then came the in- 
 evitable woman's question: "Will you love me as 
 much when I 'm old, Alan?" 
 
 After a moment he said with passion: "Young or 
 old, sick or well, living or dead, Sombra, you hold 
 me. As you held me that first night of all, you '11 
 hold me to the end." 
 
 "And you me." 
 
 She sighed with exquisite content, and slipped her 
 arm dirough his. That clinging touch, her warm 
 nearness, the rough, sweet smell of her autumn flow- 
 ers, these things were to remain with Maclear for 
 many and many a day. 
 
 He said, with that appeal of which he was uncon- 
 scious, "You '11 never let me go, Sombra?"
 
 164 THE BRIDGE 
 
 "Never, dear love. And you '11 never stop lovin' 
 me?" 
 
 She could but just hear his answer. "Never, even 
 if you were dust." 
 
 They laughed a little, at themselves, at each other. 
 
 Never, never, never. Word too great for the 
 knowledge of man's mind, but not for the courage of 
 his heart. The mist flowed past -them as though they 
 walked at the bottom of a sea whose substance was 
 cloud, not water. Endless, soundless, it blotted out 
 their world, drifting perpetually. Time, youth, life 
 itself seemed one with that continual silent flood, 
 passing away. 
 
 Sombra said : "What ? s queer about love like ours 
 is that it don't stay the same. It grows. When I 
 used to think about it before you come I thought 
 folk fell in love, an' got married, an' just stayed so. 
 It ain't is n't that way. It 's growin' all the 
 while, from day to day. Alan, you remember when 
 you laughed at my shoes and I ran away into the 
 mist? Well, I would n't do that now. I 'd know 
 better than that you thought to hurt me." 
 
 "And when I was looking for you, I thought you 
 were hiding on purpose, that you did n't want to be 
 found. I 'd know better than that, too." 
 
 Her sweet dark face, a little pale, turned to him 
 in the mist. Her deep voice shook. "Dear," she 
 said, "wherever I 'm called on to go, anywhere in
 
 THE MIST 165 
 
 life, anywhere in death, I '11 want you to find me." 
 
 "I '11 follow and find you wherever it is, my wife." 
 He kissed her as though she were a holy thing. They 
 went on together. 
 
 Their way led them through a little poplar wood, a 
 grove among the dunes. The straight and slender 
 trunks glimmered about them in the mist. Golden 
 leaves yet clung on the spires above them, here and 
 there, like metal flowers. In the hush of the mist 
 they could hear the beaded moisture dripping on the 
 sand. 
 
 Here and there, very gradually, the mist was thin- 
 ning. It gave them glints of distance, immediately 
 curtained by a fresh and soundless cloud, driving 
 in from the lake. Vanishing windows in the tre- 
 mendous wall of vapor showed them a bush, a tree, 
 a gleam of sunlight, the gray shadow of a wheeling 
 gull. Some reeling tunnel, brief as a breath, opened 
 on sand or water, the clear sky or a single blade of 
 grass. 
 
 Sombra's hand closed suddenly on Maclear's. 
 She said, "Who 's that walkin' in the wood with us?" 
 
 "I did n't see any one." 
 
 She pointed. "Away there. Just like a shadow, 
 a great shadow driftin' through the trees." 
 
 He paused, looked, listened. The mist enclosed 
 them. They walked on again. He said, "I guess 
 that was it, just a shadow of the mist, Sombra."
 
 166 THE BRIDGE 
 
 "No," she answered quietly, "it was a man." 
 
 "Was it?" 
 
 "Yes. I think it was Mail." 
 
 Maclear was silent. He had not told her of the 
 happening of the night; he did not speak of it now; 
 but he was troubled. He stared among the ghostly 
 gleaming stems of the little poplars. The mist gave 
 him a hundred shapes, a hundred shadows,- but not 
 one that might have been a man. He asked, more 
 of himself than of her, "What would Mait be doing 
 out in the mist?" 
 
 "Mist or darkness, it 's all one to him, Alan." 
 
 Unconsciously Maclear tightened his hold on her 
 arm and began to walk faster. He remembered that 
 great spirit of the night, under which the walls of 
 Morning House had seemed to crack and strain; he 
 wondered if it were abroad now, walking the island, 
 seeking, seeking and never finding. He thought of 
 Mait Ransome no longer as an individual but as an 
 embodied hunger and a dark desire. 
 
 Swift as a breeze passing across a pool, the mist 
 quivered and thinned. He looked for an instant 
 down a narrow aisle between wet poplar stems and 
 little aspen bushes. He too saw a shadow moving 
 there with outstretched hand, no sooner apprehended 
 than hidden, lost again in innumerable webs of run- 
 ning mist. He was not sure, but he thought that
 
 THE MIST 167 
 
 huge uncertain shadow had been running, too, in the 
 same direction as the mist flowed, and as though ir- 
 resistibly driven with it. He saw no more. 
 
 They came out of the wood, and walked down the 
 beach. Maclear said, "Where's Sal?" 
 
 "Gone to look at the night-lines he had out by the 
 ledge. Let 's go home that way, Alan, an' look for 
 him." A little later she went on, "There's some- 
 thing I 'd like to say to you about Sal." 
 
 "Say it, dear heart." 
 
 She was silent, then suddenly stooped, caught his 
 hand, and kissed it. He saw there were tears in her 
 eyes. "It's this," she whispered: "if I didn't love 
 you for anything else, Alan, I 'd love you for the way 
 you act to Sal." 
 
 "He 's your brother, you silly child!" 
 
 "Yes. He's my own dear brother. We been 
 dearer to each other than most brothers an' sisters, 
 along of the queer life we Ve had. We 've always 
 helped each other. Alan, if there ever comes a day 
 when I ain't here, dear, to help Sal, do you help 
 him for me." 
 
 He knew what she thought of; and, following her 
 thought, his own heart wrenched in him so that he 
 could hardly control his voice. He dad so, and 
 promised: he would always be a brother to Sal, for 
 her sake. He looked into her tender, happy eyes;
 
 168 THE BRIDGE 
 
 and the word "brother" laid no least remembered 
 shadow on this fulfilment of his life, with its lovely 
 anxiety and its lovelier hope. 
 
 He had indeed forgotten. As he had promised 
 himself, so it was: the past was becoming to him as 
 though it had not been. 
 
 Along the beach, in the dizzy flow of the brighten- 
 ing mist, Sal came to them. When he saw them he 
 began running. He joined them, and stood a mo- 
 ment, breathing quickly, and looking from one to 
 the other with eyes bright and wild with excitement. 
 
 "What 's happened, Sal?" 
 
 It was Maclear who spoke. But the boy re- 
 plied to Sombra. "It 's a ship," he said briefly, 
 "grounded out on the sands." 
 
 Something held them silent an instant. Then 
 Sombra asked, in a low voice, "Grounded in the same 
 place?" 
 
 "In the same place as the fruit-boat went to 
 pieces? I guess so. But I ain't sure. It 's so thick 
 over the water yet that you can't see a thing. But 
 when I was out along the ledge, seeing to my lines, I 
 heard little sounds." 
 
 "Voices?" 
 
 "No. The wind 's sendin' a ripple in, under the 
 mist. I heard it strike on somethin'. I heard other 
 sounds, little creaks like riggin', little noises like 
 a ship's sails make, slattin' in the wind. Once I
 
 THE MIST 169 
 
 thought I saw a great tall shadow, as it might 'a' been 
 the sails of a ship." 
 
 "She 's run ashore all standing, then?" 
 
 "I think so. Last night, I guess, in the fog." 
 
 "I heard a siren," said Maclear, quickly. 
 
 "Hers, maybe." Again, Salvator was looking 
 gravely at Sombra. He went on: "Don't be worried, 
 Sis. I guess the crew got off all right in the boat." 
 
 Then Maclear looked at Sombra, and saw that she 
 was pale and that her eyes were full of tears. He 
 realized, perhaps fully for the first time, how the 
 lonely and desolate lives of the brother and sister had 
 been governed by that event of twenty years before; 
 that without it they would not have existed; that 
 through it their years had been shaped to a reflec- 
 tion of its own sorrow. 
 
 Meeting his eyes, she wiped her own on the back of 
 her hand, like a child. "I 'm silly," she said simply, 
 "but I get terr'ble worked up when a ship goes ashore. 
 Seems like as if it reminded me What you goin' 
 to do, Sal?" 
 
 "I 'm goin' to swim out and look. I was just 
 waitin' to tell you and Alan. I guessed you 'd be 
 along sometime soon." He ihad been carrying a 
 string of fish. These he laid in a tuft of dune grass. 
 "You watch them fish, Sombra," he said gentry, 
 "and stay here. We '11 know where to find you if 
 there 's anything you k'n do."
 
 170 THE BRIDGE 
 
 She nodded. Salvator led Maclear back a short 
 distance through the mist, which seemed thrilled now 
 with an invisible excitement, and out along the ledge 
 which was the spine of the shoals. The mist was 
 sunlit now, running faster and faster before a sweet- 
 ening breeze that already sent small waves slapping 
 gaily along the ledge; but it showed no break. It 
 poured past them as though it would pour forever. 
 Sal pointed into it. 
 
 "Listen," he whispered; "she's out there." 
 
 Maclear listened. After a while he thought he 
 heard numberless faint sounds that together made up 
 the complaint as of a living substance. He heard no 
 sound of men. 
 
 Suddenly he shivered. The mist and the silence 
 oppressed him. He felt himself passive in the hold 
 of long-dead events, ruled by their ghostly hands, 
 impalpable and destructive as the mist. The whole 
 world, invisible, seemed waiting about him; an enor- 
 mous peceptiveness filled the air, the water; all exist- 
 ence was focused to one point of blind apprehension. 
 He asked impatiently, "Can you see anything yet?" 
 
 "No. But I know she 's there." Sal swept his 
 hand unconsciously across his eyes. "This mist," 
 he went on in the same hushed voice, "I wish it 'd go. 
 I don't like a mist. It makes everything seem all 
 shut up, like; an empty room, shut up, out o' doors." 
 He shook himself out of his shabby old clothes.
 
 THE MIST 171 
 
 "Anyway, I 'm goin' to see. If I was rich I 'd set a 
 lighthouse here again, and a bell to ring." 
 
 "I '11 come with you." Maclear stooped to unlace 
 his boots. 
 
 "I wish you 'd wait, Alan. I '11 swim out, and 
 if a ship 's there, I '11 yell to you, an' then you k'n go 
 back and tell Sombra. She gets all worked up, times 
 like this. You k'n come out to me then." 
 
 "All right," said Maclear, gently. He was 
 touched by the boy's thought for Sombra. He sat 
 down cross-legged on the sand. "Get on with you, 
 Sal," he said; "I want to know if there is a ship 
 there!" 
 
 Sal glanced down at him with his sudden trans- 
 forming smile. The next moment he dived from the 
 ledge. Ma-clear watched the sleeked black head 
 come up, and the water bubbling green along the 
 stones. In another moment Sal had vanished into 
 the milky obscurity. The sound of his strokes came 
 back for a little while to Maclear. Then these also 
 ceased). Nothing was there but the mist running 
 over the ripples. Maclear sat still, staring into the 
 cloud. 
 
 That endless flow of obscurity made him feel dis- 
 embodied from the world. 
 
 He thought he waited a long time before he heard, 
 strange and thin-drawn through the fog, Salvator's 
 voice.
 
 172 THE BRIDGE 
 
 He jumped up and shouted in answer, then lis- 
 tened. This time he was in no doubt. 
 
 "Alan! There 's a schoorier aground here on 
 the outer shoal! All standin'! There's no one 
 aboard!" 
 
 The ghostly voice broke with excitement. 
 
 A thought leapt into Maclear's mind. He. shouted 
 back, "What 's her name?" 
 
 The reply was indistinct, ending in two clear words, 
 "Tell her." Maclear, considerably excited himself, 
 turned back along the ledge to find Sonibra. At 
 that moment he heard her voice, wildly calling his 
 name. 
 
 There was such terror in her voice that to him 
 it was as though the mist had been rent apart, and 
 showed him darkness, not day. He ran down the 
 ledge, calling to her: "Sombra! Sombra, where are 
 you? What is it?" He could see nothing. She 
 was lost in the fog. 
 
 He ran desperately. The very wraiths of the mist 
 seemed to clog his feet, as though he ran in a dream. 
 
 Again her voice came to him, sharpest dread in her 
 accents: "Alan! It's Mail! I can't hold him! 
 He's heard the ship out on the shoal! Alan, he's 
 comin'! Don't let him by! He's comin' after 
 Sal!" 
 
 Her voice approached, winged with dread. She 
 was running toward him, toward the ledge. But
 
 THE MIST 173 
 
 Mail Ransome was upon him almost before her cry 
 had ceased. 
 
 He strode suddenly out of the mist, which seemed 
 to part for him. His broad blind face was raised. 
 His dead eyes stared out lakeward. But at that mo- 
 ment he was not blind. Behind the fog he saw the 
 ship, the ship of twenty years before: the fruit-boat 
 from the Floridas, long since fallen to dust on that 
 shoal. 
 
 That vision was on his face, like a light that was 
 darkness. Maclear caught his breath. No use to 
 speak'! He gathered all his strength, sprang for- 
 ward, and seized the old man round the body. 
 
 He was strong. But as though he had been mist 
 Mait Ransome put him aside, swept him by. He 
 said, "/ 9 m not goin' to have Juan brought ashore 
 again," and passed on toward the vision of his hate. 
 
 Maclear staggered, and rolled splashing from the 
 ledge into the shallow water. He was up again 
 almost directly. But in that moment the old man 
 had plunged from the ledge as Salvator had done, 
 and like him was swimming slowly away into the'fog, 
 guided by those faint sounds that had led Salvator, 
 the complaint of a dying ship. 
 
 Maclear hesitated a moment. But after all, 
 Mait was blind and the boy was quick and could 
 swim like a fish. He gave one great shout of warn- 
 ing, then turned and ran to meet Sombra.
 
 174 THE BRIDGE 
 
 All had happened so quickly that she had not yet 
 reached him. She had been struggling with Mail. 
 He had not hurt her. As he had put Maclear aside, 
 so in the strength of his vision he had put her. She 
 had fallen in the sand. Maclear saw her white face 
 and her streaming black hair dawn suddenly out of 
 the mist. 
 
 It was a face he did not know, a face staring be- 
 yond him at horror. His heart leaped in his throat. 
 He ran to her, caught her in his arms, spoke to her, 
 he did not know what. For a moment he had for- 
 gotten everything but her. And as she had fought 
 with Mait to hold him, now she fought terribly with 
 Maclear, to get past him. As she had cried then, 
 cried his name, so she cried now. But her cry was, 
 "Sal! Sal! My brother!" 
 
 That cry rent his heart. Her desperate struggles 
 to get away from him, to follow and defend Salvator, 
 shook him to the soul. She was wild with terror, that 
 strange terror of dreams which he had seen in the 
 boy's face in the night. He tried to control her, to 
 reassure her, but she was beyond his voice. She 
 struck at him, crying all the time in that terrible dry 
 voice, for "Sal, Sal, Sal!" He imprisoned her 
 hands, and carried her back to the beach by sheer 
 force. Had he not used it she would have thrown 
 herself into the water and followed them to the ship. 
 
 He set her down on the sand. Her terror had
 
 THE MIST 175 
 
 passed to him, though he could not have said what he 
 feared. He dared not leave her. She struggled no 
 more. She seemed unconscious that he was holding 
 her. She leaned against him. Her hands were held 
 out, grasping the mist. Now and then she shuddered 
 and moaned. 
 
 He never knew how long they waited on the beach 
 behind the shoal, staring into that cloud. 
 
 Suddenly, from the unseen ship, there came a 
 great cry. He felt Sombra shudder and grow stiff 
 against him, as though she had died. There had been 
 death in that cry. But life was in her, in the cease- 
 less endeavor of her hands, in the dreadful gaze that 
 seemed to pierce the mist. 
 
 Whose voice? 
 
 They waited, awfully intent. There came no 
 other sound. 
 
 Then Maclear would have covered her eyes with 
 his hand. But she struck it down. 
 
 For the mist cleared. 
 
 It was running in great banks, as it does on the 
 lakes, each bank as sharply divided from the clear, 
 and with as clean a line, as though it were a wall of 
 stone. One of these walls passed over the island. 
 In the clear behind it there sprang suddenly to their 
 eyes the glittering ship. 
 
 Maclear knew her instantly. 
 
 The old Marline Messier had grounded so gently
 
 176 THE BRIDGE 
 
 that she lay on an almost level keel. Her deck, just 
 clearing the ripple, was tilted toward them. Her old 
 canvas swelled unavailingly in the sweet fresh breeze. 
 From deck to topsails she was frosted with the rime, 
 and the brief sun sparkled on her as though she were 
 a diamond; she looked a jewel upon the face of 
 another white wall of mist that came sweeping down 
 on her, on the bright shoal water where she lay so 
 quietly, on the island and those who watched. 
 
 It came. The ship vanished, and the water, and 
 the strong sun. But not before they had seen. 
 
 The deck was empty. 
 
 "Sombra! My God! I could n't stop him! He 
 threw me down like a child." 
 
 Even then, though her terrible look was still toward 
 the ship, she tried to find comfort for him. "I 
 know," her dead voice said, "I know. It was not 
 your fault, dear. It was to be." 
 
 Suddenly she failed and sank. Maclear laid her 
 down on the sand. Her eyes still stared toward the 
 ship. But he could no longer endure inaction. He 
 left her and ran staggering toward the ledge. 
 
 In a moment he stopped. 
 
 Some one was swimming heavily to the shore. 
 
 Life seemed to stand still for Maclear while he 
 waited. 
 
 A sleeked black head appeared from the mist.
 
 THE MIST 177 
 
 Sal's face stared blankly up at him from the fog. 
 Maclear could not move. 
 
 Very weakly the boy drew himself up out of the 
 water. Very slowly he walked to where Maclear 
 stood. His eyes stared and stared, beyond Maclear, 
 beyond the world. At last he said faintly: "I been 
 divin' after him. I could n't find him. I 'm 
 cold." 
 
 Maclear was cold, too. He gripped Sal by his 
 wet shoulders, and strove, by impassioned words, 
 with entreaties, to break that terrible blank stare. 
 He could not. 
 
 "He come on me when I was leanin' over the side. 
 He took me to drown me. I threw him wjth that 
 fall you learned me. He cried when he went over. 
 I can't find him. It 's done, done, done " 
 
 Still whispering that it was done, done, done, he 
 moved slowly away from Maclear toward the beach. 
 
 Shaking himself free of that horror that rested on 
 him as the mist rested on his vision, Maclear stripped 
 and swam out to the schooner. 
 
 She dawned upon him like a shadow from the deli- 
 cate blinding mist. He walked again her glimmer- 
 ing deck. He searched and shouted like a madman. 
 Then, as Sal had done, he dived; came up empty- 
 handed; dived, and dived again. At last he was ex- 
 hausted. He rested on the deck a while, shaking.
 
 178 THE BRIDGE 
 
 Then he swam back to the ledge, dressed, and fol- 
 lowed Sal to the beach. 
 Salvator had not gone far. 
 
 He had fallen on his face at Sombra's feet. And 
 now she sat crouched above him, swaying to and fro. 
 She had drawn the boy's passive head on her knees, 
 encircled his bare wet shoulders with her strong arms, 
 crooning to him, passionately pitying him, with low 
 mother-sounds of immeasurable grief. As Maclear 
 approached she lifted her head suddenly and wailed 
 aloud. And the mist took up her cry, and the lake 
 increased it, and the unseen hollows of the dunes 
 returned it against his heart. 
 
 He said, "Sombra, my dear love." 
 
 After a long time, and it seemed from a long dis- 
 tance, her eyes were looking at him. 
 
 She said: "Don't stay here, Alan. Leave us be. 
 It 's done." 
 
 "Sombra, my dearest, listen! It was an accident; 
 it was in self-defense. Oh, my God, listen!" 
 
 For suddenly an infinite terror struck to Maclear's 
 soul. 
 
 She was distant, removed, fading from him, as 
 though he saw her through miles of mist. She lifted 
 Sal's brown hand. As if she had not heard him at 
 all, she repeated, in the same dead voice: "It 's done. 
 He 's done it with this hand at last." 
 
 "Sombra!"
 
 THE MIST 179 
 
 He caught her in his arms. And at that, as if he 
 had struck her, she shrieked. She beat him away. 
 
 "Sombra " 
 
 In her eyes was death. That, and a great horror 
 of shame, not for herself, not for Salvator; for him. 
 
 "My love! my wife " 
 
 "Never again, Alan, never again. We 're not fit; 
 not fit for you to as much as touch us any more!" 
 
 His hands reached out to her. She shrank from 
 them as though her body would have burned him had 
 he touched it. She said in that dull, strange voice, 
 "We was beneath you before, not fit for you." 
 
 "Sombra, Sombra, you '11 break my heart." 
 
 "What are we now? Christ of pity, what are we 
 now?" 
 
 He tried to find her, to hold her. She and Sal had 
 risen, and somehow they escaped him. The mist 
 flowed between; and that space seemed to widen and 
 increase, till it was a gulf without bound, wider, 
 deeper than the channel of the Bersimis, an un- 
 plumbed hollow that no assurance, no love, no reason 
 could span; unbridgeable as death. 
 
 "Sombra!" 
 
 But she was gone. He had lost them. Clinging 
 together like stricken children, they were running 
 from him into the mist. 
 
 Only her wild voice came back to him, "Never! 
 never no more!"
 
 180 THE BRIDGE 
 
 K 
 
 Maclear was standing outside a closed door. 
 
 He must have spent hours standing outside it, 
 waiting for a word that never came; he was familiar 
 with every mark in the unpainted wood of the panel 
 against which his head rested. He knew every curve 
 and whorl and ribboned line in the silvery pinewood. 
 He had traced them over and over with his ringer. 
 
 He remembered little of the last days but this 
 closed door in the eternal corridors of the mist. 
 
 There were other things, all of which he had en- 
 dured, all of which had passed from him. 
 
 Garroch had come out to the island in the launch 
 from the town. The schooner's crew had all been 
 picked up by the fishing-tug and taken safely into 
 port. Strangers also had appeared on Tallis Island, 
 unknown faces, forgotten as soon as seen, looking 
 at him, talking to him out of this mist. 
 
 One of these faces said to him that it was a bad 
 job, and that he 'd always knowed something like 
 this 'd happen, and that the young folk seemed all 
 broke up about the old feller instead of seein' it as a 
 happy release, which it was, look at it how you would. 
 Maclear agreed that it was a bad job. But he 
 referred to life itself. 
 
 Mail's body was recovered ; it was brought in from 
 the deep water, into the empty rooms of Morning
 
 THE MIST 181 
 
 House as Juan Luz had been carried in long ago. It 
 was taken over to the town and quietly buried with 
 what unknown irony and unconscious charity! in 
 the little cemetery where Sombra's mother lay. 
 They rested at last together, with their love and their 
 hate. 
 
 There were few questions to be met, no doubts. 
 An old man, known to be half-witted, swimming out 
 to a stranded ship, there to fall from her deck and be 
 drowned, there was nothing here to question or to 
 doubt. Only Maclear and Sombra and Salvator 
 knew the truth. 
 
 It was a truth that could never be told, for her 
 sake. Perhaps Salvator alone realized that he would 
 never be able to lift that burden from his soul by 
 any way of confession. . All his life he must bear in 
 silence the fruit of a long-past love and a long-past 
 hate. By the truth he could never make himself 
 free. 
 
 He moved in that shadow, far off from them and 
 apart. 
 
 Maclear was left alone, standing outside a closed 
 door. 
 
 Wherever he went in the perpetual mist, it stood 
 before him. He wandered the island to escape it, 
 and it fronted him in every barrier of the fog, every 
 shadow of the flowing cloud. At night he returned 
 to it, and rested with his hands upon the threshold,
 
 182 THE BRIDGE 
 
 sleepless and still. Hour by hour, he knew, that 
 space was widening between them. 
 
 He was released now from the small duties, the 
 arrangements which had spared her. All was over. 
 Old wrongs had come to their appointed end. In 
 the lonely rooms of Morning House the little painted 
 hulls gathered the blowing sand, and the mist ran 
 over an empty place. 
 
 Once more Tallis Island was solitary, returned to 
 its wandering voices, its waves and shadows. Even 
 the schooner had been towed off the shoal, patched, 
 and taken to the town yards. 
 
 Maclear leaned against the closed door, and 
 thought of the golden room in which he would have 
 set his love, and the door he would have shut for the 
 delight of opening it; and laughed. 
 
 Silence had laid a hand on Morning House. This 
 was the first sound that the empty rooms had heard. 
 The flickering spaces of the mist seemed to shrink 
 from it. 
 
 He began to call her, very softly: "Sombra! Som- 
 bra!" There was no answer. He called her aloud. 
 Something was giving way in him. He set his 
 shoulder to the door. It quivered, cracked; the bolt 
 flew out; he thrust again, savagely, as he might have 
 thrust at a living enemy. The door fell. 
 
 He had her in his arms. He had been starving for 
 the feeling of her hair against his cheek, her heart
 
 THE MIST 183 
 
 under his hand. These he had now, and his kisses 
 were on her lips, her hair, her pale eyelids. Words 
 came from his lips, broken words, stammering 
 phrases, in which there was nothing distinct but "I 
 love you, Sombra. I can't do without you. Don't 
 let me go." 
 
 All at once he was very still. She lay in his arms 
 without look, motion, or resistance. Even her finger 
 was not lifted against him. But it came to him that 
 he had not broken down the door after all. 
 
 He released her. She went slowly away from him 
 to the wall, against which she rested, hiding her face 
 in her hands. He said again, "Sombra." She 
 lifted her head then, and looked long at him. 
 Looked and looked, as one looks on a thing soon to 
 be gone, soon to be hidden; then again she hid her 
 face in her hands. 
 
 "Oh, Sombra! my dear love! my poor child! why 
 punish both of us this way?" He was suddenly very 
 tender with her. 
 
 She looked at him once more. He was her world. 
 What she contemplated was like death; the death of 
 the body would have seemed to her a little thing, 
 and what she contemplated, that she had strength to 
 do. 
 
 Like a dream half forgotten, the thought of the 
 ruin and waste and betrayal of life was return- 
 ing to him, overwhelming him; all that he had built
 
 184 THE BRIDGE 
 
 on was again running with the sand, drifting with the 
 mist. He was lost. He spoke again, using the 
 words of that dream unconsciously. 
 
 "Don't leave me. Don't let me go." 
 
 Her voice came to him as though from a great 
 distance. "I said long ago that I 'd never leave 
 you, unless it was good for you to be left." 
 
 He answered now as he had answered then: "My 
 God, as though it ever could be!" 
 
 And all the while as he fought, as he pleaded, as 
 he struggled with her, spirit to spirit, there flowed 
 in upon him, like the cold tide of the mist, that 
 weary sense of waste, that vast blank foreknowledge 
 of futility. 
 
 She uncovered her face; it was colorless; her eyes 
 were sunken in dark rings, but they looked at him 
 with steadiness; her whole being was keyed to this 
 passion of suffering and sacrifice; having seen this 
 agony, she embraced it. There was something in her 
 not of the North. She saw herself and Salvator in 
 the same dark shadow of fate. She pure child, 
 pure wife, pure mother that was to be called herself 
 a murderer's sister; she was resolute to keep Mac- 
 lear free from that stain. Looking forward, she 
 thought it would be well if she died and released him 
 frpm an inconceivable wrong. 
 
 If she could have ceased to be his wife, she would
 
 THE MIST 185 
 
 have; if she could have blotted from his mind every 
 memory of her, she would have; if she could have 
 charmed him so that he would have passed her and 
 thought her a stranger, it had been done. The height 
 of her love alone could now plumb the depths of her 
 abnegation. She had shut a door between them. 
 She would not defile him to admit him. 
 
 "Sombra, you saved me once. Will you let me be 
 lost now? I 'm lost without you. I must see you, 
 speak to you, listen to you, or I shall go mad." The 
 mist had taken everything. But as that running 
 cloud, when he walked in it, released him here a 
 stone, there a pool, again a tree, so now wild words 
 were returned to him, an agony of appeal that broke 
 upon the girl like foam. 
 
 "Alan, I saved you once by comin' to you. I 
 thought I thought as you 'd turn from us after 
 this not to be disgraced by us. Maybe I prayed 
 you* would. Maybe that was a selfish prayer. And 
 what I must do, I must do of my own self." 
 
 "Sombra" 
 
 "If I must save you this time by goin' from you, 
 I '11 do it, if I die for it." 
 
 He heard her as if from miles away, though 
 he was there at her feet, clasping her knees. She 
 did not even tremble. She stooped, and with her 
 cold hands unlaced his hot fingers. Her words came
 
 186 THE BRIDGE 
 
 to him faintly: "We ain't fit that you should touch 
 us. Will you go, Alan, 'forgive me oh, forgive 
 me for what I let you do, and go?" 
 
 "Never, Sombra." 
 
 He caught those cold hands, kissed them, wept 
 over them. No tremor broke her calm. Only after 
 a while she whispered, "Dear, if you touch me any 
 more, I shall die." 
 
 He dropped her hands and rose, facing her. Her 
 love, across that abyss love itself had dug, looked 
 back at him with an awful, solemn compassion. He 
 spoke now very quietly. He asked, "Sombra, are 
 you going to leave me?" 
 
 "Yes, Alan." 
 
 "I could stop you. I could lock you in this room. 
 I could send for the schooner and take you back to 
 the city and keep you there. I 'd almost find it in 
 my heart, Sombra, to tie you up, to be'at you, to break 
 you, to smash that beautiful body of yours till I came 
 to you; to hold you in my hands a minute, like a 
 bird out of a cage that wild thing. Only- 
 he flung up his hands "only you 'd be gone. 
 Gone." 
 
 Her eyes never faltered; rather, they lit to a 
 brighter flame. She said clearly, "I love you, dear, 
 better than my life." 
 
 And he said: "I know it. I see it. That's why 
 you are doing this."
 
 THE MIST 187 
 
 As he spoke he drew back from her. He had lost 
 her. He looked all round the familiar shabby room, 
 then again at her. And at this time, when he was 
 defeated as he had never been before, when he was 
 betrayed as never before, when the whole substance 
 of his life had gone down in ruin, at this time, as 
 never before, he was strong. 
 
 Under the sand and the mist, under the wreck and 
 the waste and the cruelty, he had come upon a rock. 
 
 He said, "Sombra, if you want to leave me, I 
 won't lift so much as a finger to prevent you." 
 
 She waited, her pitiful eyes on his. 
 
 "You shall do what you like, go where you like. 
 I leave you free. My poor love, I '11 torture you no 
 
 more." 
 
 Now she began to shake. She made no sound. 
 But the tears brimmed her eyes silently, flooded her 
 cheeks in a bright glitter, dripped on her gown. 
 
 "But, Sombra, you can never lose me. You can 
 never leave me. You can never escape me. Be- 
 cause I love you." 
 
 He went out then, and she was alone within the 
 broken door. 
 
 The night passed over Tallis Island; the mist, and 
 the keen air, and the tide of stars. When the stars 
 were going out, and a great wash of yellow light 
 filled the sky, Sombra leaned over her brother and 
 woke him.
 
 188 THE BRIDGE 
 
 He looked up at her quietly. As though the 
 thought that had been all the time in her mind had 
 been also in his, he asked, "Sombra, you goin* 
 away?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Her eyes rested on him without reproach. His 
 face twitched. He got up. He had lain down fully 
 dressed, as though in expectation of her summons. 
 She held out her hand. He took it. Clinging one 
 to the other, like stricken children, they went through 
 the empty house. They passed that room of the 
 broken door, and many another; no door had now 
 anything to close upon or to guard. 
 
 They went out into the mist. There had been a 
 frost, too, and the whole front of Morning House, the 
 pale brown reeds of the lagoons, the grass, the sand 
 itself, were all immaculately silvered. Their foot- 
 prints were black in this purity; the first sun, the 
 increasing warmth of the day, would make them as 
 though they had never been. 
 
 They went to the little boat-house. But Sombra, 
 who had been quiet as a stone, shrank and wailed 
 suddenly: "Not the little boat! Not his!" And so 
 the dumb boy left the skiff where it was, and launched 
 the heavy boat that had been Mail's. They stepped 
 into it. Salvator took the oars. They crept away 
 into the mist. 
 
 The oars made a muffled sound in the stillness
 
 THE MIST 189 
 
 and the dim golden cloud. It was like the throbbing 
 of a heart. The sound struck on a heart. And in a 
 moment the snowbirds whirled affrighted from the 
 lake beaches, and a score of wild duck lifted from 
 the reeds. The mist itself seemed to part before 
 that wild cry, "I love you, Alan, I love you!" 
 
 The oars beat steadily. The boy bent over them 
 groaned once. The mist had not parted toward 
 Morning House, but toward the town. It was like a 
 lane of rolling yellow vapor, a reeling tunnel, down 
 which the old boat crept and crept, and in which it 
 presently vanished away. 
 
 Later, when Maclear woke, he knew himself alone. 
 
 He went, too, the next day, over to the town. He 
 went in the little skiff, which he left at the yards 
 where the schooner was; then he found himself a 
 room in the town. 
 
 He had spoken no more than the truth to Sombra. 
 She could not lose him. But before he followed her 
 he must rest. 
 
 He was aware now of a blank like death, an im- 
 mense lethargy. The mists seemed to have entered 
 his soul; his senses were dulled; his whole being 
 reeled and drifted. But behind this mist his love 
 shone like a star. And love is very patient.
 
 190 THE BRIDGE 
 
 The room he took was a cheap and common one, 
 in a poor part of the town. He had chosen it out of 
 several better ones because its single window gave on 
 a blank wall and not on a view of the lake. 
 
 Here he lay in bed all day, his lean knees drawn 
 up, staring at the ceiling, too tired, for a little while, 
 even to grieve. 
 
 He stared at the ceiling because there was a stain 
 on it caused by a leak. The leak made a very good 
 map of Tallis Island, and he traced on it over and 
 over again the lagoons, the site of Morning House, 
 the sand-hills, and the shore. 
 
 He was out of sight of the lake. But in the quiet 
 of the night he could hear it. And when darkness 
 came in his ugly room, he could see it. He always 
 saw it rippling softly shoreward under a milk-white 
 mist, and rising from it a boy's stricken face. 
 
 His landlady, a kindly soul and much puzzled 
 about him, brought him food. Sometimes he ate it 
 and sometimes he forgot it, as he stared at his map 
 on the ceiling. 
 
 The house was quiet. Occasionally people came 
 to it and were admitted. He always knew when the 
 front door opened or shut, because an ill-hung picture 
 on the ill-built wall opposite his bed shook on its 
 nail. One evening, when he could no longer see his 
 map, he saw this picture* glimmer in the dusk, and 
 knew that some one had entered the house.
 
 THE MIST 191 
 
 Presently he heard steps outside, and his door 
 opened, admitting a bar of gas-light from the hall. 
 
 He said, "Who is it?" 
 
 "It 's me, Jack. You never wanted me before. 
 Do you want me now?" 
 
 "Yes," said Maclear, after a while. Then he 
 asked, "How did you know I was here?" 
 
 "Garroch told me." 
 
 "I thought you 'd quit." 
 
 "Well, I 'm here." 
 
 Raynham moved forward to the side of the bed, 
 suddenly and quietly dropped on his knees there. 
 
 "I told you I 'd never quit you if you wanted me, 
 Alan. It 's good and dark. Tell me all about it, 
 old man." 
 
 Maclear turned over, rested his forehead on Rayn- 
 ham's hand, and told. 
 
 All the time the mist drifted above them; above 
 the town and the lake; above Tallis Island and the 
 empty house; above hearts that sorrowed and hearts 
 that slept. It was like Time, ceaseless, vast, impal- 
 pable, flowing away, taking all things to itself. All 
 things but love, which was, and is, and is to come.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE SNOW
 
 IT was late when Maclear rode out to the farm. 
 His horse was tired. He went at a walking-pace 
 along a sandy track where thin ice crackled in every 
 rut. A half -moon, high-risen, barred the track with 
 regular blocks of silver between the black shadows of 
 pines that grew on each side. 
 
 Maclear looked ait every tree and bush that he 
 passed. For along this track Sombra might some- 
 times have walked; and he was glad his eyes should 
 rest where hers had rested. 
 
 He rode through an opening in the old snake-fence 
 into a wide pasture, limitless silver in the young 
 frost. From the midst an owl lifted noiselessly as 
 he went by. He crossed the pasture and entered 
 another road, at the end of which a cluster of small 
 bare buildings showed sharp and frail as paper in 
 that Northern moon. 
 
 Over them a windmill pump reared a lofty disk, 
 whirling now and then with a hollow clank in the 
 silence. A dog barked. Two great maples grew 
 behind the buildings. The Stars glittered among 
 
 195
 
 196 THE BRIDGE 
 
 their quiet branches, so delicate, small, and still, 
 like white fish in a black net. One window of the 
 house showed a light behind a red blind. Maclear 
 knew himself expected and awaited. 
 
 He rode softly to a weather-whitened door, about 
 which the dry dead stems of a vine rustled. He 
 shivered at the faint wintry sound. He dismounted. 
 Before he could knock the door opened and a woman 
 stood there. 
 
 "It 'si Maclear." 
 
 "I knew it 'd be you." 
 
 He looked with keen scrutiny at Sombra's friend. 
 
 The woman was worn and thin; she had the look 
 of a human body reduced to its hardiest fiber by 
 hard work; but in her eyes was a young and living 
 spirit; they were the only means of expression she 
 had, for her voice was so weary and nasal it conveyed 
 no meaning. She said again: "I knew it 'd be you. 
 Come right in." 
 
 He entered with her. She called softly, and pres- 
 ently a half -clad freckled boy came stumbling down 
 the stairs, stared a moment sleepily at Maclear, and 
 then led his horse round to the stable. The outer 
 door shut. She led him along a warm, stuffy hall 
 and into a dim, warm kitchen. Maclear looked 
 round as though he wanted to mark everything the 
 room contained, and remember it. For here Sombra 
 came every day.
 
 THE SNOW 197 
 
 "Set right down, Mr. Maclear. I kep' some sup- 
 per for you." 
 
 He sat down in silence. She came to the table 
 with a steaming coffee-pot and some cold meat. She 
 turned up the lamp. Her worn face was revealed 
 against the shadows; his also. For a moment they 
 measured each other quietly. 
 
 Then Maclear said : "It 's good of you to have 
 waited up for me. It 's good of you to have let me 
 come at all." 
 
 He was indeed grateful to this woman. But there 
 was another matter that went beyond gratitude. He 
 continued, in a very low voice, "Mjrs. Mackerrow, 
 how is she?" 
 
 "Her health 's good, Mr. Maclear, her bod'ly 
 health. It 's her mind 's hurt." 
 
 "I know." 
 
 "So it 's best she should n't see you yet, sir, nor 
 know you are anywheres around." 
 
 Maclear took up the knife and fork she had set 
 for him and began to eat. Presently he asked in the 
 same quiet way, "And the boy?" 
 
 "Well in bod'ly health. He 's off with Bassett 
 to-night. They 'd to take the big sleigh into town to 
 get the runners fixed, and they '11 stop over-night. 
 I 'm glad he 's away. It he 's eatin' his heart out 
 over you, some way." 
 
 Maclear looked up, and met the keen and living
 
 198 THE BRIDGE 
 
 glance of those eyes in the withered face. He said, 
 "It 's the most pitiful thing in the world." 
 
 Suddenly Mrs. Mackerrow leaned her twisted 
 hands on the edge of the table and bent toward him. 
 She said in that dragging flat voice, "I envy you 
 both." 
 
 He stared at her, scarcely able to believe she had 
 used those strange words. Her hands shook, her 
 faded face worked. In her eyes was a glow like the 
 eagerness of hunger. 
 
 "Mr. Maclear, life 's a difficult thing. Marriage 
 is another. I don't know what 's separated you an' 
 her. I don't seek to know. But I know you 're suf- 
 ferin'. So 's she. And I tell you, you be glad of 
 that sufFerin'. For love 's safe while you can suffer. 
 It '11 never die while you can suffer. Just as life 's 
 safe while you can fight. Everything 's safe, so 
 long 's you can feel enough. The pitiful thing is 
 when you 're too tired to feel. 
 
 "Some way I don't wanter know how trouble 's 
 come between you and Sombra, black trouble. I 
 don't know whose fault it is. I ain't faultin' any- 
 body, and I don't wanter know. Likely it was no 
 one's fault. Just life, likely as not. And now 
 you 're sufferin' for her, and she 's sufferin' for you." 
 
 The flat voice failed. Maclear saw that there 
 were tears in her eyes. He leaned forward and laid
 
 THE SNOW 199 
 
 his own hand over those work-crippled ones trembling 
 on the table's edge. 
 
 "And you say " 
 
 "I say to you, be glad of it. Don't try and get 
 out of it or get it over. Don't try and forget. Take 
 it, hold it, accept of it. Meet it square. It 's hard. 
 And deservin' 's nothin' to do with it. Things come. 
 Sometimes it 's your own fault and sometimes not. 
 But it 's life. If you 're goin' to master life, you 
 must take hold on it. And be glad if you keep the 
 feelin' to suffer and the heart to ache. Be glad that 
 whatever 's come, you 're sufferin' for Sombra an' 
 she for you. For while you 're sufferin' for each 
 other, you 're sufferin' together. And you can be 
 together that way till death do you part." 
 
 Presently she drew her hands from his. She 
 turned away, asking, "What you goin' to do?" 
 
 "I suppose wait." 
 
 "That 's right. You 've taken plenty else she 's 
 give you. Take this. Don't try an' get out of it. 
 Meet it square. Say, before God 'n man, This is 
 mine. You ain't goin' to try to see her?" 
 
 "No. I know she 's safe with you." 
 
 "That 's right." 
 
 He looked toward her with a flash of something 
 like jealousy. "But she 's mine yet! They 're both 
 mine, my care, my affair. You understand?"
 
 200 THE BRIDGE 
 
 She said immediately, with her strange discord 
 of voice and words, "I couldn't take money from 
 such loneliness." 
 
 There was a silence, in which he heard the monot- 
 onous solitary creak of the pump. It was broken 
 by the woman, saying, "You find it all right at the 
 Ferry House with Lanssen?" 
 
 "Yes. Quite all right. I have to thank you for 
 finding me a place where " 
 
 "Where you '11 be near her? You can stop there 
 long as you like, I guess. She won't know. There 's 
 no one to tell her. It 's on the other side of the 
 river, and Lanssen, he don't talk, anyway. And 
 he '11 be glad of your company." 
 
 Maclear did not reply. She waited, in her bent, 
 weary attitude of inexhaustible patience, her vital 
 eyes watching him intently. In a minute he asked 
 hoarsely, "Mrs. Mackerrow, where is she now?" 
 
 "Up in her room, asleep." 
 
 He got up, walked the length of the kitchen and 
 back. He stopped in front of her. He said, "Let 
 me look at her." 
 
 She was silent, measuring him intently with her 
 vivid glance. 
 
 "Let me look at her." He, who had had so much, 
 who had fared so richly in love's security, was 
 begging now for such crumbs as might have fallen
 
 THE SNOW 201 
 
 from that feast. His voice broke. "One look 
 from the door." 
 
 She did not speak. She took the lamp from the 
 table. Motioning him to quietness, she led him out 
 of the room and up the stairs. At the door of a 
 little room at the end of the upper hall she paused. 
 She opened it silently. Holding the lamp high, she 
 stood back to let him look in. 
 
 The lamp had a yellow shade. Like a blow over 
 the heart Maclear realized that the room he looked 
 into was a golden one. It was just chance, of course, 
 that the cheap wall-paper, the carpet, the bedspread, 
 the common furniture, should take a mellowed 
 golden cfolor in the light of the lamp. 
 
 "... And it shall be a golden room, Som- 
 bra. ... It won't be jiftt a room, you see. It'll 
 be a type of your golden heart. . . . But you '11 
 open to me when I knock?" 
 
 "Husband, . . . can you think of any door, and 
 me behind it, and not openin' to you?" 
 
 Oh, very well he could think of it! She was 
 there, within reach of his hand. And he dared not 
 stretch that hand out. Within hearing of his soft- 
 est word. And that word he could not speak. She 
 loved him. And he might not go to her. 
 
 His eyes had blurred. Now they cleared, and he 
 saw his wife".
 
 202 THE BRIDGE 
 
 She was deeply asleep. She did not move, except 
 that the yellow crazy-quilt lifted with her breath. 
 
 Her beauty was not changed. Her face was thin- 
 ner, but it had the look of physical health. He re- 
 mained motionless in the doorway, impressing anew 
 on his starved memory every curve and color, every 
 shadow and feature, of her who was both his shadow 
 and his light. He thought that she had wept before 
 she fell asleep. 
 
 He set his teeth. His fists clenched. She was 
 there, within reach of his hand. And he might not 
 touch her. If he went to her, and lifted her, and 
 called to her as he longed to do, his poor girl! 
 if that face were against his heart and her hands and 
 her hair touching him, she would be no nearer him. 
 
 He stepped back with a little shiver. Mrs. Mac- 
 kerrow closed the door and led the way back to the 
 kitchen. 
 
 He put on the coat he had slipped off when he 
 came in, and took his hat. He went slowly to the 
 outer door. With his hand on it, he turned. He 
 said briefly, "Be good to her." 
 
 "I will be." 
 
 "I know it. I can trust you. When I learned 
 they 'd come to you, I was glad. They 'd nowhere 
 else to go. Let me know at any time if if I 'm 
 wanted, won't you? There might be something I 
 could do, without her having to be told of it."
 
 THE SNOW 203 
 
 They shook hands. Maclear rode away wearily 
 on his tired horse into the black-and-silver night. 
 Mrs. Mackerrow watched him till he vanished. 
 Then she went in and shut the door. 
 
 Maclear rode on. Everything slept. Everything 
 seemed to have a refuge but himself and the little 
 bitter wind wandering under the vast height of 
 stars. 
 
 He recrossed the wide pasture and went back along 
 the track until it entered at right angles the con- 
 cession road, running straight as a line, mile after 
 mile, between the moon-grayed woods. The bright 
 night showed him more woods and low hills in the 
 far distance; and across hill and plowland, meadow 
 and marsh, the dwindling silvery line of the road. 
 
 At the end of four miles the sound of running 
 water came to him from the night. He turned off 
 the concession road. Stones rattled under his 
 horse's feet. Presently horse and rider came to a 
 river, running quick and black, spanned by a very 
 rough and flimsy wooden bridge. Near the other 
 end of the bridge, across the rive*r, some old wooden 
 buildings showed on the bank; and again Maclear 
 saw the light of a lamp in a single window, drawing 
 a long line of reflection right across the river, and 
 knew himself expected and awaited. 
 
 Obedient to some sign he did not know he had 
 made, the horse had stopped. Now he touched it
 
 204 THE BRIDGE 
 
 with his heel, and it moved slowly forward. Its 
 hoofs took the loose planking of the wooden bridge 
 with a hollow sound. Through the flimsy timbers 
 raced the black swirl of the water, powdered with 
 stars. All the night seemed adrift, pouring away, 
 and he with it. He was very tired. 
 
 He rode up to the house on the bank where the 
 light was, and swung heavily out of the saddle. A 
 man opened the door and came out to him. He was 
 a square man, very silent, with a thick thatch of 
 youthful yellow hair, which had never grown gray, 
 above an oldish weather-beaten face. Lanssen had 
 been a sea sailor in his youth, then a sailor on the 
 lakes. Now he was come to keeping the Ferry 
 House, as he must have something to do with water. 
 
 At one time the ferry had been the only means of 
 crossing the river. Then the bridge was built, and 
 rebuilt or repaired every spring, as the ice nearly 
 always swept it away when the break came. So the 
 ferry-boat was still useful, and Lanssen had the old 
 Ferry House rent-free in consideration for working 
 the ferry if it was wanted. He rented rooms to 
 summer visitors in the season and had been glad to 
 rent one to Maclear when Mrs. Mackerrow spoke to 
 him about it. 
 
 He led the horse away. Maclear went up to his 
 room overlooking the river. Tired as he was, he 
 could not rest. He stood at the window and watched
 
 THE SNOW 205 
 
 the passage, of the black current, sweeping away the 
 immortal stars. 
 
 Then he was aware of a faint bitter-sweetness in 
 the cold room. 
 
 He looked. On the shabby bureau was a vase full 
 of dried immortelles, the little white yellow-hearted 
 flowers that grew all over Tallis Island. He took 
 one from the bunch and raised it to his lips. 
 
 It had a small, keen, wild smell. The smell of the 
 autumn on the marshes. Sombra used to gather the 
 immortelles and dye them red and blue. For a 
 minute he felt her beside him, acutely near. Then 
 he knew he was alone. 
 
 The rough and pungent scent must have brought 
 him dreams. For when he slept he dreamed of the 
 island. He was looking for Sombra there, along the 
 marshes, by the lagoons and the shifting, desolate 
 hills of sand. He was calling her. At last some one 
 answered him. Even in his dream he was amazed. 
 For it was not Sombra who answered, but Gordon, 
 his brother. And Gordon came to him with the old 
 look, saying in the half-forgotten voice, "Say, before 
 God and man, this is mine." 
 
 Desperately, in the bonds of sleep, Maclear strove 
 to find the application of those words. And like an 
 echo they remained with him when he woke. 
 
 And that same night Mrs. Mackerrow heard Som- 
 bra cry out. She went to the little yellow room at
 
 206 THE BRIDGE 
 
 the end of the hall. She found the girl wild-eyed, 
 shaking, hurrying into her clothing. 
 
 "What is it, Sombra?" 
 
 "He 's been here! Oh, he 's near! I must go! 
 I must run away! He mustn't find me! I ain't 
 strong enough, if he should find me, to turn him 
 away!" 
 
 Mrs. Mackerrow looked at her keenly. She saw 
 the girl was dreaming, had no knowledge of the 
 truth. And yet it was the truth! With kind hands 
 and petting phrases, as to a child, she coaxed Sombra 
 back to bed. And in the morning Sombra did not 
 remember, did not guess Maclear had been there. 
 
 Later, Maclear wrote to Raynham, from the Ferry 
 House: 
 
 She 's well, and I 've seen her again, a glimpse while 
 she was asleep. That glimpse seemed to show me that I 
 must not try to see her yet; and also that she needs me 
 desperately. 
 
 I can't do anything but wait, near at hand, until things 
 change. They must change for good or evil, though her 
 mind shows no sign of changing. She is resolute to keep 
 apart from me. 
 
 You know all the truth. You know what she and that 
 unhappy lad have been through. Theirs was never a 
 normal life. If they show an abnormal reaction in such 
 trouble as this, don't wonder at it. Perhaps this is purely 
 a matter of nerves, overstrained through years, and will 
 wear itself out. I don't know. I just have to go on 
 waiting.
 
 THE SNOW 207 
 
 That's it, Jack. / have to go on. I know that I'm 
 throwing an unfair responsibility on you. I know that I 
 should be back at work again if the business is ever to re- 
 cover. I know all this. And yet I must stop here. It's 
 as if I was kept here, against my own will, by something 
 stronger than it. 
 
 I Ve a good deal of time to think. And it 's been im- 
 pressed on me that never, since I came to Tallis Island, 
 have I really decided anything for myself. At the last 
 moment things have always been turned from the outside. 
 It 's curious. I 've had about as much free-will as sand 
 or mist blown in the wind. And now I know that I just 
 have to wait. 
 
 It 's hard, this waiting, within a few miles of her. And 
 yet, there seems nothing to be done but what I am doing. 
 You know the whole truth. So you will have patience with 
 us a little longer. An end must come to it all. I don't 
 know how. By love, or patience, or death; or the child. 
 At present, the greatest of these is patience. And I won't 
 add to what my poor girl is suffering by any act of mine. 
 Yet I can't leave her alone. 
 
 The boy 's working at the farm. He 's well. I can't 
 think of him yet. It's all of her. 
 
 I was so hungry for her that I rode across the river to 
 the farm one night, telling no one. It was about a week 
 after I had seen her. She has a room at the end of the 
 house that you can see from the road. I saw her shadow 
 on the yellow blind. 
 
 I stood in the road, watching. It was raining. The 
 track was full of water. All in a minute it seemed to be 
 a bottomless abyss plunging between Sombra and me. 
 The illusion was so strong I backed away from the edge.
 
 208 THE BRIDGE 
 
 Mackerrow has a lantern swung on a post to show the 
 road to the barn when it gets dark early. This was lighted 
 now. And presently a man came along the other side of 
 the road, beyond this imaginary abyss of mine, and waited 
 under the lantern as though for me to join him. 
 
 And for that minute, Jack, my heart seemed to be ripped 
 clear out of me. For the man seemed to be Gordon, wait- 
 ing there for me to cross over to him. 
 
 I don't know why I 'm telling you this. It seems easier 
 to tell things than it used to be. I can't even say why I 
 should have thought of him then. That 's over. Heavy 
 as it was, God knows, the old trouble 's lost in the new one. 
 But it took as much grit to cross that wet road as to cross 
 the gorge of the Niagara. 
 
 When I came to the man under the lantern, he was light- 
 ing a corn-cob pipe. I 'd never seen him before. He 
 wasn't like G. in any particular. He wished me good 
 night and went on. But for the moment I'd even forgot- 
 ten her. I looked at the marks the fellow's boots had left 
 in the mud. Queer the things we do at times. Something 
 impelled me to go and stand in those marks. When the 
 light behind the yellow blind went out, and her shadow 
 with it, I went back to the Ferry House. 
 
 So Sombra, thinking herself alone on her Via Do- 
 lorosa, had love watching over her all the while. 
 She did not know. She did not guess that Maclear 
 was there, guarding her as far as possible, ready if 
 she should need him, and able to deny himself, until 
 that hour came, even a word with her. 
 
 Once, he had taken all she gave. Now he gave,
 
 THE SNOW 209 
 
 and she did not even know she took from him, though 
 the others knew. 
 
 While they waited, a great stillness came on the 
 world. 
 
 ii 
 
 There is no stillness like that of the Northern 
 woods immediately before the coming of the great 
 frosts and the snow. The very thoughts of the heart 
 are stilled with them. 
 
 Sombra felt that it was good for her to be here. 
 
 Sometimes she would walk along the concession 
 road from the farm. In the morning hoar-frost the 
 road lay like a silver cord through the young hard- 
 wood forest. There were not many farms. Here 
 and there the log house of some first settler yet 
 remained, shadowed by a huge walnut or maple, a 
 survival of the primeval woods destroyed forever. 
 Here and there were burnings, where the silvery rot- 
 ted wrecks of trees lay like bones. Here and there 
 some wood-lot rang to the sound of the ax. But for 
 the most part the bush stretched quiet and lonely, 
 elm and maple, oak and hickory, broken by the dark 
 masses of the cedar swamps where the climbing bit- 
 tersweet blazed with berries on the branches, insist- 
 ent as a flame or a cry. 
 
 Silence, and a sense of waiting. Sometimes a
 
 210 THE BRIDGE 
 
 jay screamed, or a chattering flock of grosbeaks, late 
 from the Arctic, fed among the pine-cones. Streams 
 ran with a distant and muffled sound, as though they 
 knew they would soon be silent. 
 
 Sombra's mood was generally one of apathy, a 
 heavy peacefulness like that which follows an anaes- 
 thetic. For a while she was not capable of more 
 suffering. 
 
 In that dead peacefulness she walked solitary, cut 
 off from the world. She was quite alone. Mrs. 
 Mackerrow did not know the truth. Between her and 
 Sal there was a gulf fixed, as there was between her 
 and Maclear. Her compassion for her brother never 
 failed. But as the days went on he withdrew himself 
 more and more from her pity. He walked with 
 shadows she trembled to comprehend. He was di- 
 vided from her by what he had done as by hundreds 
 of miles or centuries of time. 
 
 But sometimes the numb quietness of her soul was 
 shattered. Then Sombra walked quickly and aim- 
 lessly about the woods, her dark eyes a little wild 
 now, like the eyes of a lost, homeless creature see- 
 ing strange things in the lonely world waiting for the 
 cold. 
 
 She saw a little child coming down the road, jump- 
 ing from rut to rut. He was a sturdy boy, with black 
 hair like her own, and Maclear's blue eyes. He car- 
 ried a toy gun with which he was pretending to
 
 THE SNOW 211 
 
 shoot chipmunks. Maclear walked behind him. She 
 thought the child, laughing, turned the gun on Mac- 
 lear and pretended to shoot him; and that Maclear, 
 with a white, terrible face, struck the toy out of the 
 child's hands so roughly that he screamed, saying: 
 "I can't bear to see him do that. Some day he might 
 do it in earnest. There 's unknown blood in him, 
 dangerous blood. He must be watched." 
 
 The child changed to a little girl, a fairy child of 
 whom Maclear seemed sadly tender. Her dress must 
 have been made of one given her mother long ago v 
 for it was of yellow silk edged with fur. Sombra 
 thought the little girl grew angry over some trifle, 
 stamped her feet, struck at Maclear with an absurd 
 fist; and that Maclear took a stick from the ground 
 and beat her, saying: "There 's an unknown strain in 
 her, a bad strain. She must be taught." 
 
 With such dreams Sombra wandered in her lone- 
 liness. 
 
 Sometimes she walked so far and so aimlessly 
 when these moods of terror held her that Salvator had 
 to follow her and fetch her home. She was always 
 gentle and obedient to him when he found her. 
 
 Not far away was a new railway embankment. 
 And close to the concession road some of the work- 
 men who had been employed on it in the summer had 
 built a shack under a silver maple. Many of these 
 workmen were Italians. Whoever built the shack had
 
 212 THE BRIDGE 
 
 also made a wooden cross, cut and carved it with 
 rough grace, and nailed it to the overshadowing tree, 
 whose dead leaves now half filled the hut. 
 
 Sombra liked to come here and crouch in the 
 leaves and think, and think. 
 
 She wondered if there was any way in which she 
 could right the wrong which she conceived she had 
 done to Maclear when she allowed him to bind his 
 life to hers. She was not altogether of the North. 
 There was a power for tragedy in her humility, in her 
 passionate renunciation. She sought for any means 
 by which she might mark afresh the division between 
 herself and the man she was saving from herself. 
 
 Dangerous, too, in her strained visionary mood, 
 was her simplicity. She saw the bare facts, without 
 excuse, without alleviation, as a child sees. 
 
 She saw the years men call dead, under whose 
 shadow she had lived all her life, stretching out their 
 hands from vanished Time, touching her happiness, 
 touching Salvator, shattering them. Through her, 
 she resolved, no shadow of that past should darken 
 Maclear. 
 
 She spent all her days thinking how she might 
 finally evade him. 
 
 And sitting so, thinking, thinking, in the shack 
 under the tree, at last she saw him. 
 
 It was impossible that he should remain so near 
 her and that she should never know. She had bent
 
 THE SNOW 213 
 
 her head a moment under the growing weight of those 
 thoughts of hers. She raised it, and he was coming 
 down the road toward her, leading a horse. 
 
 He was there. She had only to speak, to call, 
 and the gulf would be spanned. She crawled to the 
 back of the hut, cowering among the blown leaves. 
 She dared not move for fear they should rustle. Her 
 spirit seemed ready to break free, her whole being 
 strained toward him like smoke on the wind. And 
 she hardly dared breathe, lest he should hear. 
 
 He did not hear. He did not guess she was there. 
 It seemed impossible that they should be so much 
 the slave of the narrow senses that a little wall of 
 split cedar could imprison her agony of longing for 
 his touch, his voice. Yet so it was. 
 
 She watched him, her hands across her mouth for 
 fear that longing should break from her in a cry. 
 There was a small stream by the shack. And supple 
 and strong, he came down to it, his calm face intent. 
 Against his arm the horse thrust a gentle nose. Their 
 footfalls were deadened on the soft earth. They 
 seemed to come like shadows from the woods. 
 
 Arrived at the shallows, Maclear felt the horse's 
 flanks, loosed the bit, and let him drink. He stood 
 near; presently he stooped and washed his hands in 
 the cold water. The horse lifted its head, snuffing 
 the air. Maclear said, "Done, Joe?" and the 
 beast's soft eyes turned to him as though in kindly
 
 214 THE BRIDGE 
 
 answer. At the sound of his voice Sombra slipped 
 to her face in the shack, blinding her eyes, covering 
 her ears. Maclear, leading his horse past the shack, 
 heard the little rustle of her fall. He thought it was 
 a squirrel stirring. He went on. 
 
 When he was gone, Sombra crept from the shack 
 and looked about her. The vacant woods rose upon 
 her eyes, a horror of emptiness like the night; the 
 very air seemed drawn out of the world, leaving 
 earth and sky brittle and dry, and ready to flare into 
 fire and crumble at a breath. 
 
 Cries broke from her now that there was no one 
 to hear. She began to run after him, breaking 
 through the bushes, stumbling over thimbleberry 
 vines, sobbing and wringing her hands foolishly. 
 Those few minutes in the shack had left her weak as 
 bodily effort could not weaken her. She ran a little 
 way along Maclear's track, and fell. 
 
 Salvator, looking for her along the road perhaps 
 two hours later, found her lying there yet, her hands 
 covering a hoof-print Maclear's horse had left. 
 
 She was quite conscious. When her brother raised 
 her to her feet she could walk, leaning on him. Her 
 one prayer, so wildly made that he was terrified, was 
 that he should take her home: "Take me back and 
 hide me; hide me, so I won't see him any more." 
 
 He began to lead her back to the farm. They had 
 not walked half a mile when she fell once more.
 
 THE SNOW 215 
 
 It was neither a faint nor an illness, simply a fail- 
 ure of strength; sense, motion, life itself, seemed 
 taken from her. Salvator carried her back to the 
 little shack and laid her on the dry leaves. 
 
 He called her, held her in his arms, chafed her 
 hands. She turned her head from him with a little 
 weary murmur. She was beyond his reach. That 
 weary, patient murmur of denial was all she had for 
 him. 
 
 He took off his own coat and wrapped it round her. 
 Over her feet he heaped the dry leaves. His re- 
 served and secret face never changed. But he had 
 kissed her feet before he covered them. 
 
 Then he went out of the shack and left her, her 
 pale face turned to the wall. 
 
 He hesitated a moment, then turned in the direc- 
 tion Maclear had taken, and ran. 
 
 Maclear, riding back, saw the boy running to meet 
 him. Fear leapt in him, vivid and alive. When 
 Salvator reached him, and stood panting at the 
 horse's shoulder, he could say only, "Sombra?" 
 
 "Back there. In a little shack near the road. 
 She saw you." 
 
 "She 's sick?" 
 
 "No. Like as if she was dyin', though there 's 
 nothin' the matter with her I can make out. Dyin' 
 for you, Alan." 
 
 Maclear waited an instant. Then he said, "Go
 
 216 THE BRIDGE 
 
 back and get whatever you think we'll need, and 
 bring it there." 
 
 "Will I get them to come?" 
 
 Again Maclear waited. Then he said in a low 
 voice: "No. Not yet. Leave her with me." 
 
 His thought was that he might be an hour with her 
 alone. 
 
 After a few more hurried questions he rode to the 
 shack. Salvator -went to the farm. When he 
 reached the shack again it was late. He heard Mac- 
 lear's voice from within, speaking to Sombra. 
 
 m 
 
 "Sombra!" 
 
 Salvator had brought a bottle of hot milk, brandy, 
 a blanket. Maclear was holding a tin cup in one 
 hand, and turning Sombra's face gently toward him 
 with the other. There was no. response in that ivory 
 oval, no tremor in the pathetic lips, no stir of the 
 heavy eyelids. 
 
 "Sombra." 
 
 "She does n't hear you." 
 
 Maclear looked across quietly at Sal. "Not yet. 
 But she will." He called again, patiently, persist- 
 ently: "Sombra, Sombra." 
 
 By and by there was the palest change in her face, 
 like the change in the sky, heralding a dawn. She
 
 THE SNOW 217 
 
 did not stir nor open her eyes. But he said to Sal, in 
 the same assured way, "Now she hears me." 
 
 "I thought she was dead too." 
 
 Maclear looked again at Sal, remembering that 
 this was the first time they had been together since 
 Sal and Sombra left the island. He said: "No. 
 She will not die. See. Watch her. Sombra." 
 
 Again that faint stir of the face, like the passage of 
 light rather than movement. They waited. In the 
 silence they heard the horse tossing his head under 
 the maple; the stream, growing gray in the evening 
 mist, seemed to change its note with its color, and 
 they heard it; heard, too, that first breath from her 
 lips that shaped his name. 
 
 "Alan" 
 
 Salvator, watching, saw the man's face contract as 
 though under the sharpest pain. Her eyes were 
 open, looking at her husband. She was smiling at 
 him with her old look of exquisite surrender. Both 
 knew that she had forgotten, that she had gone back to 
 the earlier days of her love. 
 
 This was perhaps the hardest thing Maclear had 
 had to bear, that she should have forgotten the divi- 
 sion she herself had made between them, and that he 
 should have to remember it. 
 
 "Sombra." 
 
 "What a long time you 've been gone, dear love!" 
 
 "Drink this, Sombra."
 
 218 THE BRIDGE 
 
 She sipped the milk obediently from the tin cup. 
 Then she shut her eyes. "No more. I 'm kind of 
 tired. I don't want any more." 
 
 "A little more, Sombra." 
 
 She shook her head, as it rested on his arm, with 
 her plaintive murmur of refusal; but she was smil- 
 ing faintly. 
 
 "Sombra." 
 
 After a while she whispered again, "Alan." And 
 the lovely secret smile transfigured her. 
 
 "You must take a little more. Come, child. Be 
 good." 
 
 Like a child she murmured, "Must I?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Once iriore she drank from the little tin cup. 
 Maclear asked quickly of Sal: "Did you bring any- 
 thing to eat?" 
 
 Sal gave him some soft bread. Maclear soaked 
 little pieces of it in the milk and fed her with them 
 one by one; let her rest; called her back, and fed 
 her again. So for an hour, while the boy watched; 
 and over the silent woods stole the cold night fringed 
 with stars. 
 
 At last Maclear said to Sal, "She '11 be all right 
 now." 
 
 "You Ve brought her back." 
 
 "Yes. Once you brought her back for me. Now
 
 THE SNOW 219 
 
 I Ve brought her back for you. I suppose Macker- 
 row will come and fetch her home?" 
 
 "He said, soon as Bassett gets in with the horses." 
 
 The lad was sitting in the doorway, his face turned 
 from Maclear toward the glimmering dusk. No one 
 could have read the thoughts of his heart. Maclear 
 laid Sombra down in her nest of dry maple leaves, 
 and at the movement she opened her eyes again and 
 smiled upward drowsily. Maclear's face was drawn 
 and sharpened as though with fatigue; he rose stiffly 
 to his feet. Instantly her outstretched hand groped 
 for him. He gave his own into it, and she was still. 
 Bending over her, he said, "SombraJ" 
 
 "Alan," she answered at once from the gateway of 
 consciousness. 
 
 "Do you feel ill, Sombra? Are you in any 
 pain?" " 
 
 "No. No. Only tired." 
 
 He leaned lower. "Rest, my dear heart, my poor 
 girl." 
 
 The boy in the doorway bent his head until his 
 face was hidden on his knees. He sat very still. 
 His somber courage would not have escaped any of 
 these words, any more than he would have run from 
 steel or fire. 
 
 "Alan." 
 
 "Yes, love?"
 
 220 THE BRIDGE 
 
 "Why are you goin' away?" 
 
 "I must go, Sombra." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "There 's something you asked me to do for 
 you." 
 
 "Is there? How queer! I don't remember." 
 
 "I remember." 
 
 "That 's right. My head 's kind of tired. Every- 
 thing 's a long ways off. I forget. But it 's all 
 right if you remember." 
 
 "It's all right if I remember." 
 
 "You 're so good to me, Alan. You always was. 
 You 're always givin' me things and doin' things for 
 me. There 's one thing I know there 's somethin' 
 big I asked you to do for me. Never mind now. 
 You 're goin' to do it." 
 
 "I 'm going to do it." 
 
 "And it '11 take you some while?" 
 
 He was silent a moment. His voice was low as 
 hers, as he answered: "It '11 take a long while, Som- 
 bra. It '11 take me a long way." 
 
 "And you don't mind?" 
 
 "It takes me away from you, dear heart." 
 
 "And you can't get along very well without me, 
 can you, poor boy?" 
 
 Something of the old wondering, starry compassion 
 was in her eyes, those shadowed eyes that still saw
 
 THE SNOW 221 
 
 only dreams. She said in her murmuring voice: "I 
 know it was somethin' that had to be done, dear, or 
 I would n't let you do it. Go quick, so you '11 come 
 back to me quick. It 's somethin' that must be done; 
 ain't it?" 
 
 "So you say, Sombra." 
 
 "Or I would n't let you go. I don't remember. 
 But it seems like as if you 'd been gone a long time. 
 A long time. Kiss me before you go, Alan." 
 
 In silence he knelt and touched the chill pure curve 
 of her cheek with his colder lips. Something higher 
 was here than passion. Something greater than long- 
 ing. She lifted her hand languidly and just touched 
 his face in the dusk, with a caress like a child's. She 
 said : "Good-by, dear love. I '11 sleep till you get 
 back. Then I'll be well." She slept before he 
 could rise from his knees. 
 
 Presently he freed his hand, went to the door, and 
 stood there without speech or movement. If he had 
 been aware of himself at all he would have known 
 that when he rose from his knees to leave her he 
 stood at a greater height than his own stature. 
 
 After a while he said quietly, even cheerfully: 
 "Well, she will be all right now. You need n't be 
 afraid for her. Mackerrow will be along soon, and 
 then you can get her home." 
 
 He went out, and patted the patient horse standing
 
 222 THE BRIDGE 
 
 under the maple. Without stirring, Salvator asked, 
 "Alan, you goin' to leave her?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Oh, my God, Alan! You goin' to let her leave 
 you?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "She 's doin' it. But she '11 die of it." 
 
 "No. Oh, no, she won't die. It 's steady, now, 
 Joe! it 's wonderful what people can bear, and not 
 die." 
 
 The boy with the hidden face heard the light stir 
 of hoofs in the leaves as Maclear rode past him. He 
 said softly, "Take care of her, Sal." 
 
 In a flash Salvator was running at his stirrup. He 
 said, lifting his dark face to Maclear and speaking 
 breathlessly, "You give me that to do for you?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "To take care of her for you?" 
 
 "Yes. Do it as you have all along. For me too 
 now." 
 
 "I 'd die for you, Alan," said Sal, clearly. 
 
 Maclear stooped from the saddle and touched the 
 boy 's shoulder. "Live for her," he said, and turned 
 his horse to the bank and was gone, in a flurry of 
 leaves like birds. 
 
 Long after he was gone, long after Mackerrow had 
 come with the creaking farm wagon banked with hay 
 and blankets and taken Sombra home, long after the
 
 THE SNOW 223 
 
 night had flooded in upon the world like a deep sea, 
 Salvator remained at the shack. 
 
 After a long, long while light stole over the world ; 
 it was as though the cold blue waters of night, 
 drowned in which all life had lain, thinned and 
 changed; the voice of the running water changed. 
 When the dawn came, it showed the shack, the woods, 
 the earth itself furred thick with the dazzling sub- 
 stance of the white frost. Each twig was a crystal 
 against the pale yellow sky. 
 
 In all this unearthly world, the running of the 
 brook alone made any sound. 
 
 And Salvator was standing against the wall of the 
 shack, his arms spread out on each side of him so 
 that his body formed a cross. It was a white cross, 
 for he was silvered from head to foot with the frost. 
 His dark eyes, hollowed by those hours, stared up- 
 ward at the wooden cross nailed upon the tree. 
 
 He, too, was not all of the North. Dim powers, 
 passionate repentances, unknown strivings of other 
 lives commanded him. He had been standing before 
 the cross all night. 
 
 rv 
 
 And as though the frost, which was silently blot- 
 ting out all memory of love and summer from the 
 mind of the earth, worked in the same way on her
 
 224 THE BRIDGE 
 
 own mind, Sombra had no memory of those hours in 
 which she had lain in the shack, in which Maclear's 
 hands had been about her and his face near hers; in 
 which he had called and she had answered. 
 
 The time was one of unimaginable stillness, purity, 
 and beauty. A little light snow fell every night. 
 The earth yet had life in it; the streams ran between 
 delicate fringes of ice and the ferns were green under 
 this snow. It was tender and harmless as flowers. 
 It hid the first advance of death under a covering 
 that seemed as mild as the blades and leaves of 
 spring. 
 
 The woods were very silent. Only on sunny noons 
 the black squirrels, most noiseless of their kind, 
 looped about the birch trunks in a silent ecstasy of 
 play. 
 
 Maclear saw silver ice in the river shallows every 
 morning. But it melted soon. The clear dark water 
 flowed free and strong. It seemed impossible any- 
 thing should ever prevent it in its course toward the 
 great lake and the ultimate seas. 
 
 It was like the current of human life, human love, 
 sweeping onward to an unimaginable fulfilment. 
 
 So by day. But at night, crossing the bridge, 
 Maclear would feel on his face a bitter wind, creep- 
 ing down the river channel from the hills. It slid 
 out of a far distance like a blade, and caught the 
 breath, and sent the blood back upon the heart. And
 
 THE SNOW 225 
 
 he would see, behind those hills, the green ice-blink, 
 reflection of the Arctic floes, glimmer like low moon- 
 light all night long. 
 
 There came a day when, waking in his gaunt room 
 at the Ferry House, he felt a subtle change, not only 
 that of temperature. It was as though a battle had 
 joined unawares while he slept. 
 
 Behind the Ferry House to the north rose a ridge 
 of land grown with thin pines. Toward them, in the 
 glittering golden morning, Maclear climbed. And 
 as he climbed from the hollow to the height, he heard 
 above him the sound of a tide; a sound solemn in 
 the sun, and inhuman, the going of the great north 
 wind. 
 
 On the ridge it met him full. It marched to meet 
 him with leveled spears. 
 
 Perhaps, in the great ocean of air, some current 
 a thousand miles away on the shores of a frozen sea 
 had given that wind birth. And it had swept south 
 across the musk-ox pastures, across the desolate 
 tundra, and the caribou-moss, and all the Land of 
 Little Sticks, drawing in its wake the snow, bearing 
 on its wings the frost. Already, as Maclear de- 
 scended the hill, the ruts of the track were ringing 
 hard as iron in full sun; already the trees looked 
 dead and brittle as wire against a heaven of blue 
 stone. 
 
 By the river he stood and saw the cold at work.
 
 226 THE BRIDGE 
 
 Where a shadow touched the water by the shore, a 
 long frost-leaf, unimaginably delicate and beautiful, 
 built itself from the element. The shadow length- 
 ened, and the leaf lengthened, throwing out branches, 
 buds, other fronds; thickening, whitening, until all 
 that little inlet was subject to the frost. And that 
 was going on all along the shores. Every stone and 
 lily-pad was a vantage-point for the ice. 
 
 In a thicket of seeded goldenrod behind the Mac- 
 kerrows' orchard Sombra, wandering in the sun, saw 
 a small golden thing lying among the brown stems. 
 She stooped and took it in her hand. 
 
 It was a little goldfinch, a thistle-bird from one of 
 those great flocks which she had heard passing over 
 Tallis Island in the night, their voices piping bravely 
 to one another under the great void of stars. Per- 
 haps this was the very last of those weak, heroic trav- 
 elers, fallen by the way. 
 
 Salvator, coming to look for her with his continual 
 watchfulness, found her holding the little yellow 
 bird to her heart, while her tears fell on it. 
 
 So the winter came. 
 
 In the strange silence and idleness of that winter 
 to which Maclear, the man of action, was condemned, 
 he found his mind occupied, as once it had been oc-
 
 THE SNOW 227 
 
 cupied with the blown sands of Tallis Island, with 
 the struggle of the river against the cold. 
 
 It was a struggle that seemed almost human, almost 
 conscious. Like the innumerable indestructible 
 sands, like the unremembering mists, it seemed to 
 have a meaning for him. 
 
 Night by night, the plates and scales of delicate 
 ice crept out from the banks. Day by day the river 
 broke them down. Yet they increased, advanced to- 
 ward one another; and between them the current of 
 living water ran narrower and narrower. 
 
 Then there were days of iron frost in the hills, 
 and the lakes that fed the river froze deep. After 
 that came a sudden thaw and rain, which presently 
 froze as it fell, a glittering rain as of glass. But 
 the thaw had shaken the ice in the headwaters; and 
 down the river came the floe like the April ice- 
 break out of time, to swing and grind on the shallows, 
 to pack against the groaning piles of the bridge, and 
 to link bank to bank in a rubble of wild crystals in 
 a single zero night. 
 
 And prisoned and bound as it was, the river still 
 fought. It sent black runnels to carve the stranded 
 ice into islands. It pressed and fingered against the 
 grounded pack above the bridge. It hollowed the 
 shore ice into great milky bubbles, and cut unseen 
 pits and holes in its barriers. It worked with a si- 
 lent and inexhaustible patience. It seemed to pre-
 
 228 THE BRIDGE 
 
 figure some force which thus, in patience and silence, 
 worked forever against the waste and ruin of life. 
 
 Lanssen said, "That bridge, she won't hold till 
 spring." 
 
 Maclear always seemed to see Lanssen through 
 the steam of a kettle. In his old age he suffered 
 much from cold feet, and sat with his striped, stock- 
 inged feet curved for hours over a stone hot-water 
 bottle, which he constantly refilled. He continued 
 placidly, "Aye, the bridge, she '11 go, and the boat 
 she won't be no good, and we '11 be cut off. Cut off, 
 we '11 be. I 'm just as glad. There always conies 
 water in the boat and gets my feet cold." 
 
 Now and then Maclear saw Sal, hauling loads of 
 wood to the town. The boy did not stop. And there 
 came no message from the farm. 
 
 Silence, patience, and the heart's indestructible 
 faith, fighting; fighting all the time, like the river. 
 
 At last the bridge went. The pressure of the ice 
 and the water behind the ice crushed it into a litter 
 of planks and posts. Black water rushed over the 
 ice-cakes, spread, and froze. The pack groaned, 
 heaved, and swept forward, to ground again a little 
 below. The thrust subsided. Lanssen, who had 
 been watching from the bank with Maclear, said, 
 "Now we're cut off. I go V fill my bottle." 
 
 But later Maclear heard the old man roaring:
 
 THE SNOW 229 
 
 "You go back! Quid, I tell you! That ice, she won't 
 bear! She 's shook!" 
 
 Maclear went out again into the cold gray day. 
 It was one of those days that lend to everything the 
 clearness and stillness of glass. In this translucent 
 light he saw Mackerrow's big bay team, hauling the 
 wood-sleigh, drawn up on the other side of the river. 
 Bassett was at the horses' heads. As Maclear 
 watched he saw the man move. The horses' heads 
 bowed, their breath steamed in the stillness. 
 
 The sleigh went forward, creaking. Bassett led 
 the team out on the ice below the wreck of the bridge. 
 
 "You're crazy! You! Go back! Quid, I tell 
 you!" Old Lanssen added strange Scandinavian 
 oaths. Bassett did not stop. He looked over at 
 them a moment, and they saw his teeth white between 
 the upturned points of his mackinaw collar as he 
 grinned at them. Then he continued, coaxing the 
 horses, who were scared, slipping on the ice. 
 
 The sleigh came toward them. Lanssen was mut- 
 tering angrily: "That feller! He always know too 
 much. I tell him, the ice, she 's shook. She " 
 
 He stopped abruptly. At the same moment, and 
 as it seemed noiselessly in that silvery stillness, the 
 sleigh tilted up. One of the horses rose straight 
 against the pole, pawing the air, a living picture of 
 terror. The other was down. They saw a black
 
 230 THE BRIDGE 
 
 ring spreading, rushing on the white surface around 
 the sleigh. They saw Bassett, to his credit, with a 
 bared knife, slashing at the harness. Then the black- 
 ness, which was water, seemed to spread and rise and 
 swallow them like night. 
 
 All happened so swiftly that it was like a picture 
 thrown for a moment on a white sheet and flashing 
 away. Maclear took one leap back to the house, 
 caught up an ax, and ran back with it. He heard 
 old Lanssen say wretchedly, "Now I got to get my 
 feet cold." Then they too were out on the ice, run- 
 ning toward the place where it was broken. 
 
 It was a clean break. The edge, that is, was solid, 
 eight inches of gray river ice, veined and grained 
 like marble. On the side nearer the Ferry House, 
 Bassett was clinging, his wet face upturned, blued al- 
 ready about the mouth from the cold. Behind him 
 was a boiling trouble in the water. 
 
 Maclear flung himself flat on the edge and caught 
 Bassett by the wrists. Lanssen grabbed Maclear 
 round the body and hauled. They had Bassett out 
 on the ice in a moment. He lay an instant, gasping, 
 then staggered to his feet and ran round to the 
 other side of the hole. He stammered : "Bully 's 
 down and under. But there 's Bud." 
 
 Maclear said to Lanssen, "Go and get some boards 
 and rope." He said to Bassett, "Catch hold of my 
 legs, and don't let go." He lay down again on the
 
 THE SNOW 231 
 
 ice, leaning far over that black trouble of the water. 
 Bassett's half -numbed hands were gripped round his 
 ankles. Maclear had his knife in his hand. He 
 groped, found a taut strap, and slashed fiercely. He 
 was almost under water, the cold of it stung like 
 fire. The strap broke. He found a thicker one, and 
 sawed through that. A horse 's brown head surged 
 suddenly to the surface, wild, straining, terrible, 
 fighting humanly for breath. Poor Bully was gone> 
 under the ice. But here was Bud. Bassett released 
 Maclear, ran forward, and held the horse under the 
 jaw, keeping his head up. Presently the beast 
 quieted, with long shuddering snorts and rolling eyes. 
 Bassett repeated continually in his trembling voice: 
 "I won't quit you, Buddy, ole feller. It was my 
 fault. I won't quit you." 
 
 Lanssen came back with ropes and boards. They 
 got Bud out at last with a running-tackle rigged on the 
 ice, Bassett going again into the bitter water, and 
 standing on the sunken sleigh to hitch the rope 
 round the beast's body. When he came out, he 
 was pretty well exhausted. Lanssen said: "You 
 better come on over to my place, an' we '11 get our 
 feets warmed. You " 
 
 A sound like the boom of a gun came from the 
 water-worn hollows beneath them. The ice on which 
 they stood vibrated like a stretched string. Maclear, 
 Bassett, and the horse plunged for the bank. Lans-
 
 232 THE BRIDGE 
 
 sen turned and ran for the Ferry House. They all 
 gained solid earth at the same time, and looked 
 around. Great cracks were starring the ice in all 
 directions. Black veins opened as they looked. 
 Some mysterious balance had been disturbed when 
 the team went through. Now, it would be a hazard- 
 ous chance for a man to attempt the crossing. 
 
 Lassen, on the Ferry House side, raised an arm 
 to Maclear. "I told you we'd be cut off/' he 
 i oared placidly, "and we be. You better take that 
 feller along to the farm. I 'm goin' to get my bottle 
 heated up. My feet 're cold." 
 
 He vanished. Maclear looked at the shivering 
 man, the shivering horse. He said: "Come on. 
 We '11 have to go to the farm." 
 
 Bassett groaned, "I dunno 's I can walk." 
 
 "Oh, yes, you can," Maclear assured him grimly. 
 "You Ve got to run." 
 
 They started off at a sharp trot, leading the horse 
 between them. Maclear himself was wet to the 
 waist. Presently their blood warmed painfully with 
 the motion. At first they had dragged Bud. Now, 
 with a thought of his stable ahead, he dragged them, 
 his big hoofs, that had all but smashed Bassett's life 
 out, going like hammers. That was the only sound 
 in the woods, thud, thud, thud, thud. Like the 
 beating of a heart. A heart straining toward home. 
 
 They reached the rise of the track, and stood a mo-
 
 THE SNOW 233 
 
 ment, looking down toward the farm. They could 
 not see it. Then Maclear was aware for the first 
 time of a faint continuous sigh and rustle throughout 
 all the woods. There was no wind. He lifted his 
 face. Something small and light touched his cheek. 
 
 "This '11 be the first heavy fall of the year," panted 
 Bassett. 
 
 Maclear did not answer. There was something 
 in the sound that hushed the voice and seemed a 
 warning to the mind. It was so gentle, ceaseless, and 
 inevitable, this sound of innumerable grains of dry 
 snow, falling, falling on the woods. 
 
 They went down to the farm. 
 
 An hour later Sal, coming from the barn where 
 he had been tending Bud, saw Sombra standing in 
 the yard, waiting for him. 
 
 In that hour the snow had wonderfully increased. 
 Already it was curding into a crisped ripple by 
 every stake in the fence, around the root of every 
 tree. The air was a haze of delicate grains, dry 
 and fine as dust. They drove along the hard earth 
 with an incessant whisper that was the very note of 
 forgetfulness. 
 
 Sombra did not seem to be aware of the snow. 
 She must have been waiting for her brother some 
 lime. Her face was pinched and wan. In that hour 
 even her beauty seemed to have perished. With a 
 little gesture of despair, the boy ran to her.
 
 234 THE BRIDGE 
 
 "Sombra! We thought you was down in the 
 chicken house. Why did n't you come into the barn 
 if you wanted me?" 
 
 She lifted her head. The dry snow lay like a 
 whitening of years on her hair. She looked at Sal 
 with a passion so intent, an appeal so wild, that his 
 heart gave a great leap. He said: "Sombra! What 
 you want?" and foreknowledge sank his voice to a 
 protest, a whisper. He stood facing her. He made 
 no movement to touch her or to comfort her. It was 
 as though they looked at each other across a great 
 space. 
 
 Twice Sombra tried to speak. Then she said 
 faintly, "I Ve seen I Ve seen " 
 
 "You 've seen Alan?" said the boy, sadly. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Bassett let the team through the ice. Old 
 Bully 's drowned. Alan and old Lanssen saved Bas- 
 sett and Bud. Alan had to bring them home." 
 
 "I saw him." 
 
 Again Sal lifted his hands helplessly. "We 
 thought you was down at the chicken house, Sombra. 
 We did n't want you to know not yet " 
 
 "I saw his head at Bassett's window as I was 
 comin' up through the orchard. Sal Sal " 
 
 "Well, Sombra?" asked the boy in the same sad 
 way.
 
 THE SNOW 235 
 
 "What 's he doin' round here? Him and old 
 Lanssen ?" 
 
 "He 's been livin' at the Ferry House, Sombra, 
 some while. Sombra, he 's let everything go, given 
 up everything, just to stop on there and be near you 
 when when you turned to him again." 
 
 She bent her head. The snow whitened, whit- 
 ened on her black braids. She stood so still that 
 Sal was afraid. He said timidly: "Sombra! Sis- 
 ter" 
 
 "As if I 'd ever turned from him! my dear love!" 
 
 Her voice was faint, yet had a thrilling quality of 
 music in it. It was the music that used to sound for 
 Alan in the old summer days at Morning House. 
 Sal said, very low: "Oh, Sombra! poor Alan!" 
 
 "And he 's been near me all this while?" 
 
 "Yes, Sombra." 
 
 "Watchin' over me when I thought he was far 
 away?" 
 
 "Yes, Sombra." 
 
 "And that time, when they told me I 'd took sick 
 a little in the woods that time it was n't a dream?" 
 
 "It was no dream, dear." 
 
 "He was there? He come to me? He held me in 
 his arms?" 
 
 "He held you in his arms, Sombra." The boy's 
 face was white as her own. "He talked to you and
 
 236 THE BRIDGE 
 
 made you better. And when the time come oh, 
 Sombra, he loves you so true! he went away and 
 left you. Poor Alan!" 
 
 "Not so poor as if he had me with him, and me 
 not fit, not fit. But he don't know it yet, my dear 
 love" 
 
 Salvator shrank and was silent. 
 
 "And I 'm afraid I 'm afraid he loves me so 
 he '11 never let me go!" 
 
 She lifted her head. The boy said shakenly: 
 "Why, sister, why what 's come to you? You look 
 happy!" 
 
 For Sombra's beauty had come back, strange, 
 still, radiant; a winter of beauty after her summer 
 season. There was something unearthly in her as 
 she looked at her brother with the snow on her head 
 and those spiritual fires in her eyes. She said and 
 no tenderer whisper had ever passed her lips in the 
 days of happy love at Tallis Island "Ain't that 
 a fine thing for any woman to know? He spoke true. 
 He '11 never let me go. He '11 never set himself free 
 of me and mine." 
 
 Presently the fire died out of her. She bent her 
 head again, shivering. She whispered: "I must go 
 away from here. I must leave him if he won't leave 
 me." 
 
 Some remembered ecstasy held her, she spoke as 
 though she were in a dream. Salvator did not know
 
 THE SNOW 237 
 
 what to do. If he took her into the house she might 
 meet Maclear face to face; and he was afraid for 
 her overwrought, exalted mind. He led her into 
 the barn, folded a horse blanket round her shoulders, 
 made her sit down in the soft straw. She murmured 
 to herself; he caught a few words. He remembered 
 afterward that she had said something about the 
 railway and the trains. When she was quiet, smil- 
 ing secretly to herself, he left her, though with an 
 alarmed heart. He ran back to the house to tell 
 Maclear. 
 
 But Maclear was already gone. He would not 
 wait, Mrs. Mackerrow said, for fear that very thing 
 would happen that had happened. He said he 
 thought there was a way to cross the river on the ice 
 above where the bridge had been, and that he would 
 get back to the Ferry House before the snow was 
 heavier. 
 
 Salvator listened in silence. When Mrs. Mac- 
 kerrow had done, he looked round the trim, warm 
 kitchen. A curious sense came to him that he would 
 never see the kindly place again just so, just as it 
 was. He asked curtly, "Where 's the boss?" 
 
 "Gone to Westerley's about that buck-saw young 
 Bert borrowed. If the weather keeps on, he '11 likely 
 klop all night." 
 
 Again Salvator listened in silence. He felt that 
 in some way the very forces of nature, the common
 
 238 THE BRIDGE 
 
 course of daily existence, were concerned in and 
 aware of this business of theirs. Bassett helpless, 
 Maclear gone, whatever was coming, whatever hour 
 the great clock of life had struck, he was to be left 
 alone. He had been alone all his life with shadowy 
 and immutable dreads. Mrs. Mackerrow asked, 
 "Where 's Sombra?" 
 
 "Down at the barn. I '11 go fetch her in." 
 
 He went down to the barn. Half-way across the 
 yard, he was running, an arm over his eyes to shield 
 them from the snow. 
 
 "Sombra." 
 
 He plunged in at the door, and the great sweet- 
 scented stillness enclosed him. Bud stamped in the 
 loose-box they kept for sick beasts. A mouse rus- 
 tled in the stored fragrance of the hay. That was all. 
 
 Sombra was gone. 
 
 Sal looked round, calling her, though he knew it 
 was in vain. She had taken the old oilskin coat 
 Mackerrow kept hanging on a peg. He seemed to 
 hear her voice: "I must go away from here. I 
 must leave him if he won't leave me." 
 
 Where had she gone? 
 
 Sal ran out of the barn. She could not have been 
 gone many minutes, yet already she was lost to sight 
 in the snow, hidden from him by innumerable fall- 
 ing crystals, fine as ashes, as though by a wall. Her 
 footprints were there, her one link with what she
 
 THE SNOW 239 
 
 was leaving. But even as Sal stared at them, they 
 were melting under his eyes, blurring into invisibil- 
 ity. 
 
 He hesitated a minute, wondering if he had time 
 to go back to the house and tell Mrs. Mackerrow. 
 He had not. 
 
 He ran after Sombra. 
 
 VI 
 
 Again and again Sombra whispered to herself, "I 
 must leave him, who won't leave me." 
 
 She was walking through the woods, following a 
 short cut to the railway that Mackerrow had shown 
 her. Arrived at the railway, she meant to follow 
 the line down until she came to the station, and there 
 wait until there was a train, in any direction, as 
 her one necessity was to set distance between herself 
 and the man she loved. 
 
 She had calculated neither time nor the miles. 
 She had measured nothing justly. When she saw 
 Maclear at the farm, and knew how near he had been 
 to her, and again fled from him, she touched an in- 
 tensity of renunciation that left her, perhaps, not 
 entirely sane as we count sanity. Perhaps that cease- 
 less dwelling through weeks on one despairing 
 thought had a little shaken her pure and simple mind. 
 
 At .first, huddled in the farmer's old tarpaulin
 
 240 THE BRIDGE 
 
 coat, she had not heeded the snow, or had heeded it 
 only as an additional security. The skies seemed 
 to be showering themselves upon her; and in a little 
 while everything lost its shape, became blurred and 
 featureless in the drift of white, as though, under this 
 very dust of forgetfulness, trees and fences lost mem- 
 ory of their own likeness. One would have thought 
 this continuous rain of smallest crystals could have 
 come from nothing less than the falling-away of a 
 universe, thus dissolving through space, grown old 
 and cold. 
 
 She whispered, as though to an unseen companion : 
 "We '11 go away from him, lovey. We '11 set him 
 free that way. Even if it 's against his will, it 's 
 best so. Then he '11 never need to be ashamed of us, 
 never need to be afraid for us." 
 
 So, for his sake, she went on into a world that with- 
 out him was indeed a ruin, grown cold and old. 
 
 She walked very quickly in spite of the snow, 
 which soon lay deep enough to clog her feet. She 
 passed from the more open hardwood trees to a track 
 that wound between spruce and balsam that even in 
 the snow made a night of their own. They grew so 
 close together that wind hardly swayed their sweep- 
 ing branches of everlasting green. Each cluster of 
 needles on the boughs was massed with snow; it 
 lodged like dust in the interstices of the cones.
 
 THE SNOW 241 
 
 The substance of the trees seemed to be turning into 
 snow. 
 
 To her brother, following her with his every sense 
 intensely applied to that one action, she seemed to 
 have melted away and vanished in snow. 
 
 Footprint after footprint of her track he gained 
 and passed. They were clear enough at first. But 
 soon he knew that behind them their tracks were be- 
 ing obliterated in a few moments, as though they had 
 been left in some fluid; that not a trace remained in 
 the yard, by the farm, or on the concession road they 
 had crossed. No one would know where to look for 
 them, nor what had happened to them if they did not 
 return. The iron earth and the snow would have no 
 speech to say, Here they went, and here passed Love. 
 
 He set his lips, glanced at the weather, and pressed 
 on. 
 
 Here and there among the spruce a current of air 
 carved the snow into small hollows that almost looked 
 like footprints. Sometimes these lay beside Som- 
 bra's track, as though another and vaguer shape had 
 joined her in the woods and walked with her. Some- 
 times Sal must pause, looking for the real prints; 
 must stand a moment, watching all marks blur, 
 soften, and fill, before he could go on. At these mo- 
 ents he felt Time drifting past him with the snow. 
 
 The snow, blotting out distance, altering the real
 
 242 THE BRIDGE 
 
 features of things, distorting all into its own likeness, 
 had this effect upon the mind: it became necessary to 
 hold strongly to some purpose, to be supported by 
 some deliberate putting forth of will; as the body 
 was supported by the. earth under the disguising deep- 
 ening drifts. 
 
 Sombra was supported by her will to free Maclear 
 of that wrong she thought she had done him; Salva- 
 tor by his resolution to save her, and himself. 
 
 For those weeks of intense mental suffering under 
 a memory of which he spared himself nothing, ex- 
 cused himself in nothing, had, by the hidden proc- 
 esses of the spirit beside which the processes of the 
 life in the womb and the grain in the ground are plain 
 and easily to be understood, made of the dark and 
 secret boy a man. He came suddenly into his inheri- 
 tance of mastery. Not the storm, not any effort of 
 nature could stay him; not Sombra's entreaties could 
 turn him any more. Behind that unholy shadow of 
 inherited hatred which had darkened his youth, 
 which had come to its fulfilment on the deck of the 
 stranded schooner, which since then had darkened 
 his whole present and future, and the lives of those 
 most dear to him, he had seen a light. 
 
 "A life for a life." Those words, which the stern 
 creed of his upbringing read in wrath, might they 
 not be read in mercy? To those two he loved, life 
 was death without each other. If he could by any
 
 THE SNOW 243 
 
 means restore their life to them, their life in each 
 other, could he not take that as a sign, a sign of 
 his own reconciliation with life, with destiny? 
 
 He pressed on, driven by that thought; would have 
 pressed on if the grains of snow had been of fire, and 
 the sword of the frost a sword of steel. If he had 
 fallen and died, it seemed that his spirit must have 
 gone on, and manifested his will through the very 
 stuff of the world. 
 
 Sombra's track still led him through the ever- 
 greens. Under their immense drooping fans they 
 had drawn and concealed all the winged things re- 
 maining in the woods, as completely as seeds were 
 hidden in the ground. This ground descended, and 
 in time the spruce and balsam were mingled with 
 alder and tamarack; and her footprints led him 
 across a stream, stilled and dumb under silver ice 
 and snow. It was the same stream that ran by the 
 hut where she so often went; where Maclear had held 
 her, talked with her, left her. 
 
 It was as though some recollection of this dragged 
 her back. For now, and for the first time, Salvator 
 was sure he was gaining on her. 
 
 She was not far ahead. The snow had confused 
 her; she had lost the trail to the railway. She was 
 not aware of it. The insistent soft whisper of the 
 snow had released another whisper in her mind. 
 What if there were another way to set Maclear
 
 244 THE BRIDGE 
 
 free? a surer, better way than all? What if she 
 just lay down, and covered her face, and felt noth- 
 ing any more but the sure descent of the snow, the 
 sure descent of sleep? "We 'd be safe then, lovey," 
 murmured Sombra, her large eyes melancholy and 
 lost. "No one to be troubled by us, no one to be 
 ashamed for us. We must come of a wild dark stock 
 for such a thing to have happened. Not fit for him, 
 lovey, and him so clean and high and proud. Will 
 you forgive me? I was always far beneath your 
 daddy, dearie. Maybe it would be best this way. 
 We 'd rest then. And we 're tired, tired of keepin' 
 on, without him." 
 
 She pressed on, now through a growth of delicate 
 young birch, almost invisible in the snow. In some 
 places their stems were close-set as grass, complain- 
 ing all together with a little ceaseless sound. The 
 weight of the snow was on her feet. The weight of 
 it seemed on her heart. She was tired, tired. She 
 remembered how he had spoken to her, going back to 
 the island. "Rest in it, my dear," he had said. And 
 that which she was to rest in was his love, her true 
 home, only home of all loving hearts in all the world. 
 She had no other. And that she must leave for his 
 sake. There was nothing else to rest in but the 
 snow. 
 
 As if the snow fell on her very thoughts and had 
 power to change and hide them, as it hid her foot-
 
 THE SNOW 245 
 
 prints, she forgot the purpose with which she had 
 left the farm. She stood still. She shut her eyes, 
 and stretched out her bare hands to the ceaseless 
 noiseless descent that was as the ruin of a universe, 
 the falling-away of years, falling like ashes on the 
 world. It was as though she sought the acceptance 
 of this visible forgetfulness. 
 
 She felt her outstretched hands clasped strongly in 
 other hands. Her own were very cold. The grasp 
 hurt her. It was like painful life, dragging her back 
 from that harbor of rest the snow offered. 
 
 She opened her beautiful, desolate eyes. She 
 looked at her brother wildly, mournfully. She 
 asked: "Oh, why have you come? Why don't you let 
 me go?" 
 
 With a calm look his eyes shone upon her. He 
 seemed exalted in conflict as another might have 
 been in happiness. He said, "I Ve come now to 
 save you and me." 
 
 "Oh, leave me be! Leave me be, and go! 
 Brother, if I ever done anything for you, if I was 
 ever dear to you, leave me be now to do what 's 
 best for Alan!" 
 
 She turned and stumbled blindly form him. He 
 followed and caught her in his arms. It was as 
 though life itself held her, to drag her back, to force 
 her into more wrong. She struggled against his 
 hold. All her quietness went. When he released
 
 246 THE BRIDGE 
 
 her, she could only slip down and kneel at his feet, 
 huddled in the snow, crying to him she knew not 
 what, nor he, only that he would let her go, leave 
 her be, and go, for she was not fit, not fit. 
 
 He waited, very pale under her words. But his 
 steady look did not change, nor his calm. The frost 
 had touched her cheek. In one place it was wax- 
 white and bloodless. He laid hold of her again; 
 held her, sobbing and crying, while he rubbed her 
 cheeks with snow; when he saw the blood returning, 
 and knew, by the greater concentration of her eyes, 
 she suffered pain from it, he lifted her to her feet. 
 
 "Sombra," he said, "look at me." 
 
 She looked at him with her lost and tragic gaze. 
 She said, "I '11 never forgive you if you stop me 
 doin' right by Alan." 
 
 Plaintive and trivial phrases she must needs use 
 to clothe the passionate renunciations, the denials and 
 despairs of her soul; as each body of this dust clothes 
 the flame of which none can say whence it cometh or 
 whither it goeth. 
 
 "Sombra, you 're more to me than any one else 
 in the world. But now your forgiveness or your un- 
 forgiveness don't matter to me more than a flake of 
 snow." 
 
 She was held and stilled by his solemn voice as 
 his hands could not hold or still her. He lifted those 
 hands before her, held the open palms in front of her
 
 THE SNOW 247 
 
 eyes. And the storm of the snow seemed suddenly 
 weak, faint, of little account in the balance with that 
 gesture. 
 
 "Sombra, what do you see on them hands o' 
 mine?" 
 
 "I see the snow." 
 
 "No," answered the son of Juan Luz; "it ain't snow 
 that 's on them. It 's blood." 
 
 She shivered, her breath caught in her throat. His 
 hands fell. He stood before her; and the curled and 
 crested drift crept round them like a wave of the sea. 
 He did not again touch her. But she could not 
 escape him. 
 
 His voice was a breath. But before it her pas- 
 sion shrank and dwindled as the storm and the wind 
 had done. 
 
 He said again, "There 's blood on my hands. 
 
 "You 're my dear sister. You 're Sombra. 
 
 "We know the truth, you and me. Many might 
 find an excuse, a pardon for what I done. But we 
 don't see it that way. Many would say I done it in 
 self-defense. It ain't true. I did n't have to do it. 
 When he come at me on the deck of the wreck, I 
 could have got away, as I 'd got away many and often 
 a time before. But the hate rose up in me, the dark- 
 ness was on my eyes, and I struck, I struck. 
 
 "For what I done to you when I done that, maybe 
 you 'd forgive me. But your forgiveness don't ease
 
 248 THE BRIDGE 
 
 me. No one knows but us three. Suppose we died, 
 no one in the world 'd know the truth. Ain't that 
 so? Yes, but there 's Something 'd know. And that 
 Something sets me away from the world. No one 
 knows. But I 'm like Cain, wanderin', separate, till 
 I can get linked up with life again. 
 
 "The hate come on me, and I was afraid, and I 
 struck. It-'s all in that. The hate was n't rightly 
 my hate; the love that started it was n't my love. It 
 began before we was born. It 's been overhangin' us 
 all our lives, the dread and the fear of it. Yet when 
 it happened, Sombra, it was n't that that happened. 
 Not just death! It was that I had an instant, a sec- 
 ond, in which I was free to choose. And I chose hate. 
 I was afraid, when there was nothin' to fear but a 
 shadow. I give in to a long-past evil. And by 
 givin' in I brought that evil down to the present, and 
 laid that shadow on ourselves." 
 
 His solemn voice sharpened. "Oh, Sombra," he 
 said, "to wake every day to that shadow, not 'way off 
 in old years, but now! To see you runnin' from Alan 
 as though you was a leper, and know why! To see 
 that blind face I could have escaped, in every man's 
 face, and that old grippin' hand in every man's hand, 
 and to know all the while I did n't need to fear them! 
 At first, if I could have run into the middle of a city, 
 or climbed on top of a great high buildin* and 
 shouted out, 'I killed an old man because I was
 
 THE SNOW 249 
 
 afraid! Come and punish me!' I'd have been 
 near happy. But there 's no punishment like a sin 
 you can't pay for. God knew what He was about 
 when He let Cain go about free and did n't let any 
 one touch him. And his punishment, says the Book, 
 was greater 'n he could bear." 
 
 He dashed wild drops from his eyes. "Sombra, 
 by my own deed, and only by that, I brought the 
 hate and the trouble between our father an' mother 
 an' Mail down to our own time. I 've set a mark 
 of hate in the world afresh, like as if it was Cain's 
 mark. I can never wipe it out by confession, because 
 of you and Alan. Christ! would there be any pun- 
 ishment hard as mine if it was n't for the way out?" 
 
 He was trembling, but without any effect of weak- 
 ness. The snow went over them, and behind the 
 snow was the shadowing of the night. But time had 
 ceased for them. 
 
 Sombra's cold lips just shaped the words, "What 
 way?" 
 
 "By rebuildin' as far as I may what I overturned. 
 By openin' the way for love, instead of hate. If 
 if it was given me to do that, I 'd know I was n't wan- 
 derin', separated, cast off past the findin'." 
 
 "Oh, Sal, what do you mean?" 
 
 "You got to come back to Alan. I know I tell 
 you, I know if you go to him, there '11 a way be 
 opened. You got to see him face to face."
 
 250 THE BRIDGE 
 
 "Never, never " 
 
 "Sombra, while I live, you shall never leave him 
 this way." 
 
 He took her in his arms again. His eyes were a 
 fanatic's at that moment, his beautiful face pitiless. 
 She struggled against him, but his resolution swept 
 her on with him. She was helpless, she, his sacrifice. 
 He led her back through the little birches. They 
 stood like rods of glass in the coming twilight. All 
 their former tracks were utterly gone; it was as 
 though no one had passed that way. 
 
 "Oh, Alan!" she sighed. "Oh, Alan!" 
 
 Perhaps the thought was in her mind that Alan 
 would have saved her from this, would have himself 
 released her, would have, out of his love, himself set 
 her feet upon the road that led her away from him. 
 But she could fight no more. 
 
 Her brother said, "I 'm takin' you to him." 
 
 But she knew he was not. 
 
 He might set her down in the same room with 
 Maclear. He might give her from his own arms to 
 her husband's. But no physical nearness could 
 bridge the distance she had set between them. It 
 was still there. 
 
 In the early evening the world was narrowing every 
 moment. Solemn shadows clustered on the edge of 
 the bright thicket of birches. The wind was dying 
 away. It was becoming very cold with the night.
 
 THE SNOW 251 
 
 "Oh, Alan!" sighed Sombra very softly, "Oh, 
 Alan!" 
 
 They traveled a mile, and Salvator was half car- 
 rying her. The snow and the cold had suddenly be- 
 come a weight greater than hers. The life of the 
 body seemed consciously to shrink and withdraw, as 
 though it were an animal going into hiding. His 
 limbs were like stone. He moved them and felt noth- 
 ing. He looked at her. He thought the cold had 
 touched her also. He looked at the small ripples, the 
 delicate patterns in the snow, and saw again a trail 
 beside the one they left, as though a huge unseen 
 companion traveled with them. He knew now that, 
 before they regained the farm, they would walk 
 shoulder to shoulder with Death. 
 
 The passionate will flamed in him more fiercely. 
 It might be given him to save not only her love, but 
 her life, for Alan. 
 
 They went on and on. It became an unspeakable 
 effort of endurance just to go on, bearing her with 
 him. She was quite passive in his hands, quite help- 
 less; this, in one of her strength and vigor, seemed of 
 itself unnatural, dreadful. He measured his ad- 
 vance as one measures the endless movement of a 
 dream; he saw the stalk of a dead flower emerging 
 from the white, and passed it; and there was another 
 stalk just ahead. A tree reared a cowled shadow in 
 the whirl of flakes, and he passed it with enormous
 
 252 THE BRIDGE 
 
 effort; and there was the same tree yet to be passed, 
 and again, and again. 
 
 There came the time, with night closing round 
 them, that she slipped from him and fell, and lay in 
 the snow. And his stiffened hands had hardly the 
 strength to raise her. 
 
 He crouched in the drift beside her, coaxing her 
 as you coax a child: "Come, Sombra, just a little 
 way more, just a little way." 
 
 She whispered, thinking of the man to whom he 
 was taking her, "A long, long way!" 
 
 "Sombra," besought her brother hoarsely, "I 'm 
 I can't carry you no more, Sombra. And you '11 
 die if you stop here." 
 
 She raised to him eyes like the night itself. Her 
 voice was a breath. "Perhaps that would be best. 
 Perhaps that is what God means." All her old com- 
 passion and sisterhood shone in her. "Go on, dear." 
 she said; "you can't fetch me back to him this way. 
 Go on and leave me be." 
 
 He rose to his knees in the snow. He lifted his 
 hands to that dark and solemn cloud in which the 
 trees of the forest were lost, and even the snow be- 
 coming one darkness. He lifted his face. Softly 
 the snow touched it. He said, "What am I to do!" 
 
 With infinite softness her voice came to him. 
 "Oh Sal, this ain't bringin' us nearer together!"
 
 THE SNOW 253 
 
 He beat his hands wildly against his own body, as 
 though he hated the thing that had weakened against 
 his will. She said gently, "Go on, dear." 
 
 "You 're crazy, Sombra. You don't know what 
 you say." 
 
 "He '11 forget me, this way. He '11 be free, this 
 way. This way " 
 
 "Ain't God's way, Sombra." 
 
 He had seen something, a square of more solid 
 dark in the shadows, a line of more stable whiteness 
 in the whirl of the snow. He got up and stumbled 
 toward it. 
 
 It was the shack in the woods where Sombra 
 used to sit and wonder how she could free Maclear; 
 where she had lain when Maclear cared for her, and 
 she had not known it; where Sal himself had stood all 
 night before the wooden cross. 
 
 He saw it now with a remembrance of that time 
 that was like a pang. The maple was no more than 
 a faint sigh in the night; but on the trunk the cross 
 glimmered where the snow had lodged upon the 
 arms. He turned and went back to Sombra. 
 
 "Come, Sombra." 
 
 She shrank from him with a small tired sound, as 
 though she found the snow warm and pleasant. 
 With a set face, Salvator dragged her to her feet. 
 With his arms around her, he took her to the hut.
 
 254 THE BRIDGE 
 
 When he heard the rustle of dried leaves about his 
 feet, he laid her down. 
 
 Her voice came to him from the utter darkness, a 
 voice of saddest compassion and reproach: "Oh, Sal! 
 what you think you 're goin' to do?" 
 
 "Sombra, I must go on and get help. Sombra, I 
 must save you for Alan." 
 
 "Not this way, oh, brother, not this way!" 
 
 "Any way, so I keep you for him." 
 
 "Against my own will, Sal? Would you be that 
 cruel?" 
 
 "Yes," said the boy, "I '11 keep you from death it- 
 self, for him." 
 
 He was beating his numbed hands together fiercely 
 as he spoke. The sound of those blows was unspeak- 
 ably threatening to her, crouched among the leaves. 
 Presently she heard him wrenching furiously at the 
 loose flimsy cedar "shakes" of which the shack was 
 built, and then the rustling of leaves. There came 
 the scrape of a match, struck with clumsy fingers; 
 soon a little spurt of flame. And from that, as 
 flowers and branches from a single bud, more flames, 
 and more. The interior of the shack leapt at her 
 suddenly from the dark, and her brother's strange, 
 set face, all golden in the light, and the square of the 
 doorway a square of night, across which ceaselessly 
 drifted a dust of rose and gold. 
 
 He had scraped a circle in the snow drifted in ac
 
 THE SNOW 255 
 
 the door; and within a circular wall of snow he 
 had made a fire of dried leaves and flakes of cedar. 
 He went away into the dark,. and returned with dead 
 branches of spruce, beaded with frozen resin like 
 beads of gold, and frost like beads of silver. He 
 fed the fire with this weightier stuff, and it soared 
 upward with a living sound that defeated the deathly 
 whisper of the falling snow. 
 
 So intense was the cold now that only the inner sur- 
 face of the low snow rampart melted; the outer con- 
 tinually froze. 
 
 Now he went to his sister. An intent so inexorable 
 showed in his face that she said nothing; only she cov- 
 ered her own face with her hands. 
 
 He had a long woolen scarf about his neck. This 
 he took off, and with it he tied her to a post in the 
 back wall of the shack; passing the scarf about her 
 waist and knotting it on the outside of the wall with 
 triple knots too large to pass through the warp-holes 
 which had admitted the ends. Then, standing before 
 her in the wild firelight, he half stripped himself, and 
 wrapped her in his clothing above her own. He 
 said : "You '11 be safe here for two hours. The 
 fire '11 burn for two hours. I dare n't to make a 
 bigger one or it' d catch the shack." 
 
 He looked at her, measuring her strength, then 
 about her, measuring the defenses he had raised, 
 the fire, and the snow wall to keep the wind from
 
 256 THE BRIDGE 
 
 scattering it, and his own coats wrapped round her. 
 In the same way, looking from the door, he measured 
 his own strength with what he would have to face. 
 
 He thought he would just be able to reach the farm. 
 He gave her one last look as she sat in the pulsating 
 light, her face covered from him. He heard her 
 broken pitiful words: "Oh, Sal, it ain't to be done 
 this way, not if you bring him and set him here beside 
 me." But they drained from his will like water. 
 Then he left her, trod the path of light stretching 
 from the fire in the doorway, and again plunged into 
 the woods. 
 
 Before he entered them he took out his knife. He 
 knew he would not be able to guide any one to the 
 shack who did not know the way, and he must blaze 
 the trail. The path was long obliterated in snow. 
 
 Holding the knife in both hands, which bled where 
 he had wrenched the wood from the shack, he cut a 
 flake from the first large tree. The next was a birch. 
 He bent a branch so that it trailed in the snow. The 
 next of any size was a hemlock. He blazed the 
 trunk. So with the next, and the next, and the next; 
 until he had forgotten that he had ever done anything 
 else. He thought the trees were of stone, not kindly 
 wood, they were so hard to blaze. 
 
 Behind him, like a rose opening in the wood, the 
 light of the fire showed through night and snow. 
 While it burned Sombra would be safe.
 
 THE SNOW 257 
 
 He went on. The roll of the ground hid it. 
 When he could no longer see it, the night seemed to 
 grow colder yet. 
 
 He lost all count of time or distance. The cold 
 struck to the very centers of his life; and presently 
 he lost count of suffering. He was but a clumsy 
 stone, blundering through the white, whispering 
 night. But he held to his purpose and his direction. 
 
 He climbed a low ridge. He thought it was like 
 the slope of a tremendous white wave, suspended and 
 frozen in motion, such a wave as ran before the 
 wild winds of the lakes. He fancied that by and by 
 such a wave might crash down upon him in a crest 
 of foam, and crush out the world. He could not feel 
 the ground under the snow, and no assurance of sta- 
 bility came to him from it. All things had taken on 
 the same solemn revolving motion as the snow; they 
 mingled all together and together towered above him. 
 
 On the summit of this hill was a great tree, a pine. 
 From it trailed long strips of bark like ragged cloth- 
 ing. He forced himself toward it. Only when he 
 raised his hands to blaze the trunk did he know that 
 he had been crawling up the slope, on his hands and 
 knees. He attempted to lift himself. He managed 
 it at last, but could not reach above the snow crust- 
 ing that mighty trunk, to leave a mark on it. 
 
 He tried and tried to draw himself up, standing 
 on a heaved-out root. But his frozen fingers fell
 
 258 THE BRIDGE 
 
 away helpless from the tree. In a little while, how- 
 ever, he was satisfied, and staggered on. He had left 
 a dark sign on that tree even if he had not been able 
 to cut the bark, a dark sign pointing the way to 
 Sombra. 
 
 Here once more was the summit of a hill; and a 
 vast slope beneath, into which seemed to pour silently 
 snow, trees, rocks, the deepening night itself. Into 
 this hollow he went. 
 
 At the bottom he came on a fence. 
 
 Because men's hands had made it, suddenly it 
 seemed a human thing. He clung to it a minute as 
 though it could warm him. He could feel nothing. 
 Nor could he climb over it. But it was a snake- 
 fence. He went to the nearest angle, set his shoulder 
 under the top rail and heaved it down; so with the 
 next and the next; then he could step across. He 
 did so, and went on into an open field. 
 
 That great wave seemed still to heave high above 
 him its swimming crest of foam, higher than any 
 earthly wave could have been. Now he saw, deep 
 in its glittering and translucent heart, a star. 
 
 Only his will kept him on his feet, kept him mov- 
 ing. He was all but dead with cold as he walked, 
 and the effort to go on was a torture that crucified 
 the lingering consciousness. 
 
 He came to a wire fence. He set his foot in the 
 squares of the wire and pitched over. He fell in
 
 THE SNOW 259 
 
 the drift on the far side, struggled clear, and went 
 on. Once more there were trees about him. These 
 had whitewashed trunks gleaming like ghosts, 
 peach-trees, propped all round against their last 
 burden of fruit. His star sent a reddish beam among 
 the last ones, in which the flakes of snow glowed rosy 
 as the vanished peach blossoms. 
 
 Then the star was a window with a red blind. He 
 stood outside it. 
 
 The very power of speech was lost to him. He 
 could not call. His lips seemed frozen together 
 against his voice. He staggered to the wall, lifted 
 his heavy hand, and with a last effort sent it crashing 
 through the pane. 
 
 All about him the wave was lifting, lifting like 
 the foam of the lake, whiter than it, soaring a poised 
 breaker fit to blot the world: He felt himself raised 
 and carried into the house. Voices were around him 
 in a running daazle of light like bubbles in foam; 
 even, he thought, tears. 
 
 "Where is she, then? He 'd never quit her. 
 This here 's brandy. K'n you get it down him?" 
 
 "Wait. Wait till I lift his head. There. There, 
 now. What 's happened? Oh, my God! look at the 
 boy's hands!" 
 
 A voice, this last, that even had power to restrain 
 that falling wave. Salvator struggled toward it, as 
 to a vessel in a sea. It broke, then steadied to an
 
 260 THE BRIDGE 
 
 appeal that might have reached Sal if he 'd been 
 dead indeed. 
 
 "Sal, Sal, where is she?' 9 
 
 Twice and three times, with a terrible effort, he 
 tried to speak where he lay on the rag rug, his 
 head on Bassett's shaking knees. Then the brandy 
 did its work. They, listening with every appalled 
 sense, as though they had listened for hours, heard 
 the ghost of a voice. The words were clear, quick, 
 and distinct, though scarcely audible. 
 
 "Is this Alan? Holdin' my hands?" 
 
 "Yes, lad, yes." 
 
 "How'd you come to be here?" 
 
 "There 's been another shift of ice in the river. 
 I could n't get over. I had to come back here. I 
 found you both gone. Sal " 
 
 Sal raised himself, looking at Maclear. It was 
 inexpressibly sweet to him that Alan should be there, 
 taking care of him, looking at him with more than 
 kindness, as in the old island days. He tried to 
 smile, and some gleam of that transforming look 
 did touch his face, changing it to a deathly likeness 
 of the girl's that pierced Maclear's heart. 
 
 "Where, Sal, where?" 
 
 "In the little shack under the maple. Waitin' for 
 you. She 's safe while, the fire burns. You Ve 
 maybe an hour. You know the way. But even if 
 you don't find it "
 
 THE SNOW 261 
 
 He lifted his rent hands, gazing at them. Then 
 he smiled again, dimly. "I blazed the trail to her 
 the whole way," he said. 
 
 "Sal!" 
 
 "And anyway' you could n't lose it. It 's God's 
 way, too." 
 
 The hands fell. The whole visible universe was 
 sucked up and up, like white flame in a draft; 
 faces, voices, lights, rushed up with the rest, soared, 
 flickered, vanished away. 
 
 There was a thunder of waters. He tried to push 
 Alan back from them into safety, but he was too 
 weak. He fell into Bassett's arms. 
 
 The great wave fell. 
 
 VII 
 
 "If only Mackerrow was home!" 
 
 "This is mine," said Maclear. 
 
 There was a ghost of familiarity about the words. 
 He lifted Sal and laid him on the worn horsehair 
 couch. ,Mrs. Mackerrow and Bassett went to him. 
 Bassett watched Maclear over his shoulder. He 
 said : "Better let me come along. I 'd be some use." 
 
 Maclear just shook his head. He could not spare 
 time from what he had to do for any argument. He 
 filled a flask with brandy. He slipped on an old 
 short mackinaw coat of Mackerrow's in preference to
 
 262 THE BRIDGE 
 
 his own. He put the flask in his pocket, together with 
 an electric torch he always carried. There was cof- 
 fee hot on the back of the stove. He filled a bottle 
 with it. The woman said, "There 's old flannel in 
 the drawer of the dresser." He wrapped the bottle 
 in flannel and stowed that away. Then he was ready. 
 
 He asked the two busy about Salvator, "How long 
 should it take me?" 
 
 "Over an hour, anyway, to the new embankment. 
 Go easy. Maybe you '11 have to carry her home." 
 
 He nodded. Mrs. Mackerrow's face showed no 
 emotion, only the wrinkles had deepened till they 
 looked like scars. Maclear said to her: "Don't 
 worry. I '11 bring her back alive. Be ready for 
 us." 
 
 The weary-faced woman looked at him with her 
 strange passion of impersonal jealousy. "I '11 be 
 ready," she said. "And you you be glad you 're 
 here to find her and carry her home. That 's a 
 good thing for a man to be able to do for his woman." 
 
 Maclear went out. When he had shut the outer 
 door behind him, it was as though he had closed a 
 door between life and death. 
 
 The wind had almost ceased. It was apparent 
 only as a sound of a distant tide in unseen trees. 
 A great! silence was covering the world! with the 
 snow. 
 
 Snow was falling steadily, but in larger flakes.
 
 THE SNOW 263 
 
 Maclear found it possible to follow Salvator's track 
 through the orchard. The snow was to his knees. 
 It was so light and dry, it seemed easy to walk 
 through as drifted leaves fallen from some crystalline 
 tree. 
 
 "Find her and carry her home." 
 
 He vaulted the wire fence. Crossing the open, he 
 was aware for the first time how cold it was. He 
 would have to race the cold. Sal had spoken of a 
 fire. He did not know how long a fire would burn 
 and warm her where she waited. He wondered if 
 she waited in love. Yet he did not think of this 
 very much. He felt that something more than Som- 
 bra waited for him. 
 
 As he followed the boy's trail that would lead him 
 to her, he had the sense that he followed another 
 way, a way that had been laid down for him to 
 tread, week by week, month by month. He felt that 
 every least incident of his life was in some manner 
 linked with what he now did; that this track he now 
 followed was like the last twig of a tree of deeds 
 whose roots reached back to the past and bound his 
 dead years with his living present. 
 
 He was aware that a time was accomplished; and 
 that in its fullness some moment would presently be 
 released to him; and that in this implacable moment 
 he might gain or lose the world. 
 
 His world was Sombra. He had learned it now,
 
 264 THE BRIDGE 
 
 if ever he had not known. But what is a man prof- 
 ited, once said a Man, if he gain the world and lose 
 his soul? 
 
 Maclear went on his way. 
 
 He came to the snake-fence. Looking for the 
 place where Sal had crossed, he switched on his 
 torch. It was like an act of creation. In the disk 
 of brilliance the frosty rails sprang to a dazzling 
 clarity, and the snow was like flakes of falling light. 
 He found the place where the rails were thrown down. 
 Beyond it, in the shelter of the trees, he again picked 
 up the trail. 
 
 On this ascending slope the snow was not so thick. 
 The trees stood in a solemn order. Rank upon rank 
 they opened to him as the beam of the electric torch 
 solidified them into an instantaneous glittering exist- 
 ence. As the beam passed on, they seemed to close 
 in behind him, he seemed to walk at the head of a 
 vast soundless procession of shadows and of snow. 
 
 Now he began to feel that the snow was not light. 
 It was like wading through a dust of diamonds, of 
 stone. 
 
 He climbed. At last the thin beam showed him a 
 great pine standing on a ridge. He approached it. 
 The light gave him every intricacy of frost and gray 
 lichen and bark like carved stone, with a dazzling 
 purity and minuteness. A smear of frozen scarlet 
 was netted under a web of new crystals. He knew
 
 THE SNOW 265 
 
 that Salvator had passed here, and left a sign that 
 should lead him to Sombra, if any sign were needed. 
 
 He turned the beam on the next tree. It was a 
 black birch. One branch was newly broken. Be- 
 yond it a dim scar gleamed on a young oak. 
 
 Then Maclear was aware that he saw the trees 
 with a new clearness, as though a veil had passed. 
 It was like an added stillness to what had seemed 
 utterly still, a new solemnity to what had already 
 been hushed and remote. He looked up. The last 
 flakes of snow touched his face and ceased. He saw 
 the passing of the cloud whence they came. 
 
 A low bank of vapor, glimmering like foam, 
 spread from east to west. It was the curled outer 
 wave of an ocean of traveling cloud that now passed 
 above him. And beyond it was the black pit of the 
 north, a void in which the great stars were hung with 
 their space about them like lamps. Behind each 
 star the hollow stretched visibly. Beneath it the 
 abyss was unbridged. One after another he saw 
 emerge glittering from the receding cloud. Their 
 light was reflected from the snow until he stood in an 
 elusive radiance, and the drifts glittered as though 
 fallen from the stars and not from the clouds, ashes 
 of stars. 
 
 Maclear plunged down the slope. As he stood on 
 the ridge facing that void of stars its breath had 
 touched him from the hollows of outer space where
 
 266 THE BRIDGE 
 
 there is no life. It stung his cheek like searing iron. 
 Colder than the cloud, more pitiless than the snow, 
 was the clear heaven and the stars. 
 
 But yet he did not fear for her or for himself. 
 
 He went on. Minute points of frost pierced his 
 clothing. The drifts were heavy on his feet as lead. 
 The cold was so intense the air was all thinned away. 
 He gasped for breath, and the frost stabbed him. 
 His heart beat heavily. The only sound in that si- 
 lence was the sound of his own life, the echo of his 
 own tread. 
 
 So desolate in its perfect beauty and strangeness 
 was the frozen night through which he traveled that 
 when he came within sight of the little hut, it also 
 appeared strange. No man-made thing seemed to 
 have place with silences so august. 
 
 He advanced toward it. Out of the glimmer of the 
 ashy star-shine it grew slowly, the white mass of the 
 roof, the maple lifting over it a cloud of branches 
 delicate as thread, the cross outlined in snow upon 
 the tree. 
 
 He saw that a glow of red passed over it from 
 time to time, like a last pulsation of life, from the 
 embers of a fire that had burned in the doorway. 
 
 He saw no other sign of life, and heard no sound. 
 
 He stood by the entrance, very still. Then from 
 the darkness within the shadow of a voice breathed 
 his name.
 
 THE SNOW 267 
 
 He turned the light of the torch into the opening. 
 
 Instantly she was there; like a dream she sprang 
 out of the night. The disk of white light was cen^ 
 tered by her weary face. That was his first thought, 
 her weariness. Pain and passion had used her, 
 cast her aside. 
 
 She sat as Sal had left her, leaning against the 
 post to which she was bound. Her head rested 
 against the wall. Her bare hands seemed to say 
 that she, who had given all, now resigned all. Her 
 eyes were closed. Her mouth expressed patience, 
 utmost humility; and as Maclear looked, her lips 
 just parted on a breath: 
 
 "Alan." 
 
 He trod over the dying embers and entered the 
 shack. It was as though he would not enter until 
 she had called him in. He knelt at her side. He 
 cut the scarf which held her prisoner, and, as once 
 before in that place, he took her in his arms. 
 
 "I am here, Sombra," he said. 
 
 VIII 
 
 He was in time. The fire had burned long enough 
 to save her. But through every crack and cleft in 
 the shack the frost entered like a steel blade. And 
 she had slept. 
 
 At first it was difficult to rouse her from that deep
 
 268 THE BRIDGE 
 
 dream of the cold, which confuses the mind before 
 it harms the body, as though it would capture the cit- 
 adel before the rampart yields. 
 
 "Speak to me, dear love." 
 
 "Dear love," she echoed him out of her passing 
 dream. 
 
 "Give me your hands, your poor cold hands, Som- 
 bra. Let me warm them for you this way, against 
 my heart." 
 
 "My heart," she said. 
 
 "I 've found you, my poor girl." 
 
 "Poor girl," sighed the little wandering voice. 
 
 "I 've come to carry you home." 
 
 "Home?" 
 
 "Yes, Sombra. Yes, Sombra. Home to rest." 
 
 "Rest?" 
 
 "Just a minute, dear. Wake up. In a minute 
 we '11 go." 
 
 "Go," she said. 
 
 The stillness seized on the little echoed word. It 
 seemed immediately to become a part of the night 
 and the icy stars so high above them. In the circle 
 of torch-light her eyes opened and gazed at him, 
 sadly, familiarly. If she had been pathetic in her 
 sleep, Maclear thought he had never seen anything 
 so sad as that waking look. 
 
 He felt nothing for her at that moment but a 
 strange and almost impersonal tenderness, an over-
 
 THE SNOW 269 
 
 powering pity. All the passion and emotion, the 
 denied love and patient longing of the winter, passed 
 from him. All his life, all his ways and works, 
 seemed to have led him up to this hour, to her. Yet 
 now he knew, with an increasing certainty, that it 
 was not to her only; that his love for her was but as 
 the body for some approaching event that yet awaited 
 the soul. 
 
 He asked pitifully: "Are you afraid of me, Som- 
 bra? Why did you run away?" 
 
 "I was afraid." 
 
 "Afraid I 'd force myself on you? hold you 
 against your will? How little you know me, Som- 
 bra!" 
 
 She began to tremble against his arm. Tears gath- 
 ered on her eyelids. She drew herself a little away 
 from him, and turned her head so that she no longer 
 looked at him. He saw her lips move. 
 
 "What do you say, Sombra?" 
 
 "Go." 
 
 "Is that the only word you have for me?" 
 
 "If you 'd believe it, Alan if you M but believe 
 it it 's the best word." 
 
 "To go away and leave you forever?" 
 
 She bent her head. 
 
 "You 're strong enough to tell me to do that?" 
 
 Again that faint motion of assent. He said sol- 
 emnly: "And you have made me strong enough to go,
 
 270 THE BRIDGE 
 
 You? I don't know. Something has. If I could 
 believe if I could believe I have lost you." 
 
 He looked at her. She was within arm's length of 
 him. Her beauty, which had first claimed him, was 
 there, the eyes, the lips so faithful in denying him, 
 the generous hands now closed to him, the dark hair 
 with which he had been bound. And now he knew 
 that they were nothing, that in a little while he might 
 hold them and these dear things be no more to him 
 than a shadow, a wraith. For that dearer she, the 
 hidden self, the real Sombra, she would not be with 
 him. She was still apart from him, gazing at him, 
 with sad eyes of farewell, across the separation she 
 had made between them. And it was that inner 
 Sombra for whom his spirit hungered. Lacking that, 
 or holding that unwilling and estranged, to hold her 
 beloved body would be no more than to possess him- 
 self of ashes and of dust. 
 
 And he knew that if he could not reach her, could 
 not bridge that gulf her wild humility had made, he 
 would lose her more surely than if she died there in 
 the leaves before him. 
 
 In that moment every force of his body and soul 
 was gathered up, bent like a bow, concentrated on 
 the will to reach her. He became a being of one 
 single purpose. He breathed, his 'blood coursed, 
 his brain perceived, only for this and to this end. 
 And what he wanted, what he must reach, was not the
 
 THE SNOW 271 
 
 fair flesh he had held ; not even the love for him which 
 had never wavered, the girl's love and the wife's: 
 but that deep inner unity, that acceptance of each by 
 the other, that communion of knowledge and compas- 
 sion, which is true marriage, and without which life 
 was nothing to him. 
 
 In that moment, if her beauty had withered and 
 fallen from her, he would hardly have known. He 
 looked at the black square of the doorway, where 
 the fire had dwindled to a single red spark, and be- 
 yond which hung those intolerable stars; he wondered 
 for what purpose he was here beneath them, for 
 what they and the night and the snow had been set as 
 witnesses. 
 
 He stood up. He stood away from her. But as 
 he stepped back he seemed also to step forward as 
 a man steps to the last round of a fight, the last test 
 of his strength. A few feet between them; yet the 
 distance between their spirits made that of star from 
 star a very little thing. 
 
 He must find a way to span that distance, or he 
 must lose her, the divine part of her in which his 
 real need was rooted, forever. 
 
 He saw that space as though with his bodily eyes. 
 And his soul cried out that if there were no way to 
 cross it, then life was indeed a betrayal, and it would 
 have been better for him if he had died among the 
 drifting sands of the island.
 
 272 THE BRIDGE 
 
 Dumb as it was, the tremendous silence seemed to 
 apprehend that cry. He called her aloud, "Som- 
 bra!" 
 
 She turned. There was a sense of wrong in 
 the look she raised to him, a thrill of despair in her 
 voice. She said, "Oh, why did you come?" 
 
 "You 're afraid yet, Sombra. You need not be." 
 
 She hardly heeded. "Oh, if you had n't come to 
 save me, it would have been done by now! Done 
 and over! Now it's all to do over again!" 
 
 There was a long silence in the shack. Then Mac- 
 lear asked, "Was this thought in your mind when you 
 left the farm?" 
 
 She was weeping heartbrokenly. "No, no! Then 
 I thought only to get away from you, to leave you 
 free. But then, when I was walkin' to the railway, 
 it seemed as if it would be so easy, just to lay down 
 in the snow and forget everything, and be at peace 
 again. And better for you, better for you! And 
 now you 've come, Sal 's sent you to tear my heart 
 again. Oh me! Oh me! how will I have the 
 strength to do what I must do?" 
 
 "You haven't to do it, Sombra," he said. "My 
 wife, if it must be done, I '11 do it for you." 
 
 'Again, rapt in her pitiful passion, she hardly 
 heeded. But she looked up when he said, "Sombra, 
 I love you." 
 
 "Alan, go an' leave me be."
 
 THE SNOW 273 
 
 "You know how I love you. I know how you love 
 me. You 'd kill yourself to save yourself from do- 
 ing me what you thought was a wrong. But here ? s 
 something you don't know: Once your love was 
 greater than mine. You told me so once. You 
 were right. But it is n't so any longer. It 's come 
 to be untrue. In all these weeks since you left me 
 I Ve come to love you with a bigger kind of love 
 than yours is for me." 
 
 He looked at her solemnly, tenderly. "You 'd 
 say, Sombra, 'Is there a greater love than that which 
 would die to save love from a stain?' And I 'd say 
 to you, "There is, the love that asks only to share 
 that stain, if such it is'!" 
 
 He seemed to command her. He was infinitely 
 the master of her whose faith and beauty had ruled 
 him so long. Yet he felt, outside himself, an ap- 
 proaching mastery; something that used him as the 
 sand and the mist and the frost were used in the 
 perfecting of a year; something made, shaped, ap- 
 pointed, and now summoned in the fullness of time. 
 
 His voice was stern now, for there seemed no room 
 for tenderness any more. "I love you so," he said, 
 "that I must leave your will free. Just because of 
 it. For fear, in some unearthly way, I should kill 
 you if I did n't, blot you out not this, but the real 
 you, the thing that must come to me free as a bird 
 or not at all "
 
 274 THE BRIDGE 
 
 His voice faltered an instant. He looked down at 
 her, and a great shiver wrenched him. But in a mo- 
 ment he was calm again. She regarded him atten- 
 tively. But the reproach of her look was unchanged, 
 and unchanged the distance across which she looked 
 at him. 
 
 "All the time you Ve been hiding from me, my 
 poor hurt, unhappy girl, I 've been near. I could 
 have stopped you any day, any place. I would n't. 
 I could have stopped you from leaving me, right at 
 the beginning. I would n't. I won't bind you. If 
 I can't keep you with my hands open, I won't with 
 them shut. If you still want to run away from me 
 and hide, go on. I won't stop you. I leave you 
 your right to freedom. Only do you understand, 
 Sombra? wherever you go, I reserve my right to 
 be near you." 
 
 A single breath of air moved in the maple over 
 the shack, in a long sigh. A wave of rosy auroral 
 light ran among the hollows of the stars, flushed 
 the snows a moment, and went out. Maclear stood 
 very still. The resolution that had sustained her 
 was now his. Everything had died from him but 
 the will to reach her. He hardly existed in any 
 other sense. 
 
 She murmured, "If you 've any pity for yourself 
 or me, Alan, you '11 leave me an' go." 
 
 "Sombra, I '11 not lay a hand on you without your
 
 THE SNOW 275 
 
 consent. You need not be afraid that you will not 
 be strong enough to turn me from you. My poor 
 girl, there is nothing for you to fight." 
 
 Not in his hands, he thought; not in his hands. 
 A sense was on him that all this had been long ap- 
 pointed; that the words they used, the phrases ex- 
 changed between them, had been rehearsed by a thou- 
 sand great voices, and told where there is neither 
 speech nor language. 
 
 Her eyes besought him, her voice drifted to him 
 as though across a great void: "I ain't fit for you. 
 We wasn't fit for you before. Christ of pity! 
 what are we now?" 
 
 She must have repeated these words a thousand 
 times to herself. 
 
 "Sombra, tell me why you are not fit for me." 
 
 Her look of reproach changed to one of purest 
 pain. She muttered, "We're poor, ugly, common 
 folk." 
 
 "That never separated us." 
 
 She struck her hands together. She said in a low, 
 terrible voice, her great eyes staring upon him, 
 "Think what he done!" 
 
 "Well, Sombra?" he asked solemnly. 
 
 There was something fanatic in her now, as there 
 had been in Salvator. "Love," she said, with sudden 
 clear ardor, and as he knew, finally, "I 'm the sister 
 of one that killed an old man and broke my heart
 
 276 THE BRIDGE 
 
 doin' it. He did n't need to do it. Somethin' blind 
 and evil rose up in his heart and he struck. And in 
 all the world now, I ain't sure of anything or safe 
 in anything. It 's as if that evil might rise up any- 
 wheres. For it was my own brother that done this, 
 whose mind I thought I knew better 'n my own mind, 
 whose heart I thought was clearer to me than my own 
 heart, though sometimes, in a kind of dream, old 
 things made me afraid. And all the while, what he 
 did was hid in him, and he did n't know it, like a 
 flame in the dark, ready to break out and burn. If 
 that flame was hid in him, so near to me, so dear to 
 me, son of her that bore me too, what may be hid 
 here?" 
 
 She clenched her hands on her bosom. Her deep, 
 sweet voice was like a bell, tolling for the end of 
 hope. She said: "I don't know what's in me. I 
 don't know what inheritance I have to pass on. Evil, 
 and a stain. I don't know my own self now, nor 
 trust myself. I dread even my own self, for what 
 dark things may be hid in me. And I won't pass 
 that darkness and that dread to you, or any more to 
 your children." 
 
 He did not offer to touch her. He asked quietly, 
 "Is that your last word, Sombra?" 
 
 "My last word, if you 've any pity for us both." 
 
 He stood looking down at her. As though some 
 voice which had been ordained since the beginning
 
 THE SNOW 277 
 
 of the world spoke with his mouth, he heard himself 
 ask, "Is there nothing that will change you?" 
 
 "Nothing. Because I love you." 
 
 At another time what she said would have moved 
 him beyond expression. But not now. 
 
 Another fan of rosy light like a dawn spread 
 among the stars and went out. Another solitary 
 breath like the wind of the spirit moved the unseen 
 branches and went out. Another moment, for loss or 
 for salvation, was given to the sons of men, and 
 went out. 
 
 He heard himself, very far off, asking, "Will noth- 
 ing in life bridge that space between us?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Yes," said Maclear, in a strange voice. "One 
 thing will." 
 
 All his senses were suddenly merged into one burn- 
 ing comprehension of soul and flesh. He was all at 
 once crushed, deafened, blinded by something which 
 partook of great space, great sound, great light. It 
 was like the instantaneous opening of a door; but 
 it was more than this. It was like the rush of vast 
 wings; but it was more than this. It was like the 
 overwhelming return of vision to one blind; but it 
 was more than this. No words could measure or 
 express the depth and height of that revelation. 
 
 It was intolerable pain. Yet with it came a con- 
 sciousness of freedom, of release that not even love
 
 278 THE BRIDGE 
 
 at its highest had brought him. He possessed him- 
 self again. He was released even of his need for 
 Sombra. 
 
 The moment had come. 
 
 In it the suspended worlds, the night, the snow, 
 rode upon his eyes, sparkled into motes, vanished. 
 Sombra vanished. He was alone with that which had 
 been coming to meet him ever since he started to es- 
 cape from it, with that necessity which had been 
 as faithful to him as he to Sombra, and perhaps for 
 the same end. 
 
 He knew. 
 
 Across the gulf sprang the bridge, a single strand 
 as of fire by which he might come to her. 
 
 And now he seemed to run to meet that scorching 
 self-knowledge as for long months he had fled from 
 it. As though for the first time he drew to himself 
 his unacknowledged companion. As though for the 
 first time he stood erect, and said, "Before God and 
 man, this is mine." 
 
 From that cup which his own hand had filled, for 
 the first time he drank. He spoke, and the words as 
 he said them seemed worn with use as coins are 
 worn, though they were so new they appalled him. 
 
 "Sombra, from that poor boy's moment of fear and 
 madness, a deed instantly repented and terribly suf- 
 fered for, you build a monstrous shadow of guilt 
 and remorse to blot the light from our lives. And
 
 THE SNOW 279 
 
 you say that this shadow makes you unfit to be my 
 wife. 
 
 "I could argue against this dreadful delusion of 
 yours, but I know it would be no good. The horror 
 of it has bitten too deep for words to heal, or for 
 reason to reach. But, Sombra 
 
 "Do you remember the first night I came to you? 
 
 "I was in great trouble. You held me from it. 
 Later, at my asking, you covered it up from me, as 
 this snow covers the true shapes of things, with your 
 compassion. 
 
 "You would have heard of it, in time. But by 
 that time, under your mercy deep as the mercy of the 
 snow, its true shape would have been lost. My part 
 in it you would have taken from me as I chose to 
 give it to you. And you would have believed in 
 me." 
 
 Her eyes were watching him now as if he were the 
 only thing in the world. He looked at her sadly. 
 "Oh, my poor love," he said, "do you know what 
 kind of sinful man it is to whom you Ve given a 
 greater love than you have for your brother? 
 
 "Sombra, if there 's any stain on poor Sal, God 
 knows it 's on me too, and heavily, heavily! 
 
 "If there 's a shadow that must rest on him and on 
 you through him and God knows I see none for 
 what he did in a moment of inherited fear and dread, 
 it 's on me too, and without his excuse.
 
 280 THE BRIDGE 
 
 "Sombra, what long brooding on old terrors and 
 tragedies drove him to do at last, I did through the 
 wish to save money. 
 
 "He struck in a flash. I measured and cheated 
 and calculated. And four lives paid for what I 
 did. 
 
 "And one of those men I killed by one dishonesty 
 common as the dirt it is, and surely as if I 'd blown 
 his brains out with a gun was Gordon, my brother." 
 
 IX 
 
 The last spark of the fire died out. Only the 
 stars remained. Maclear waited. 
 
 But while he waited, a peace like that of the snow, 
 a surrender like that of the earth under the fulfilling 
 frost, possessed him. At the moment when he had 
 bound himself to his own sin, he knew freedom. At 
 the moment when he accepted his own responsibility 
 he knew release. 
 
 And that release and freedom were not dependent 
 upon happiness, nor even upon love; nor on life, nor 
 on death. 
 
 With the last words he spoke, time ceased. 
 
 At last he heard a voice, almost indistinguishable 
 from the sigh of the occasional wind. "My God! 
 What is it you 're tellin' me!" 
 
 "The truth, at last."
 
 THE SNOW 281 
 
 "You?" 
 "Yes, Sombra." 
 
 "You done that?" 
 
 "I, Sombra. Sal killed Mail Ransome in an in- 
 stant of irresponsible terror. He did n't really mean 
 to. I killed my brother to save a few thousand dol- 
 lars. I did n't mean to, either. But I did it." 
 
 For the first time he looked from the starg lo her 
 eyes. "You, my poor girl ?" he said very gently. 
 "You not fit to be my wife? It's I that have never 
 been fit to be your husband. But, Sombra, not be- 
 cause the lives of four men are on my hands; be- 
 cause I said my hands were clean. Not because that 
 crime's laid on my shoulders, but because I was a 
 coward and refused to bear it. Not because that 
 account's rendered to me, but because I ran from the 
 debt." 
 
 He was still again, standing in the doorway, turned 
 from her toward the night. With a faint low sound, 
 she stared at him, and stared. 
 
 After a little she breathed; "All the while, ever 
 since you come to me, that night in the blowin' sand, 
 and said, 'Hold me,' and I held you in my arms 
 because I knew you was in trouble, all that while, 
 this has been in your mind?" 
 
 "All that while Sombra." 
 
 "When we first loved each other, when it was 
 summer on the island, when we went about knowin'
 
 282 THE BRIDGE 
 
 the thing that was comin' to us, when you told me 
 your love, this was true?" 
 
 "True all the time, Sombra. The only truth." 
 
 "All the while we was plannin' for life together 
 and buildin' the house in the sand?" 
 
 "All the while." 
 
 "Then then we was just buildin' life and love 
 itself on runnin' sand in a blind mist " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Oh, you! you that I Ve give all to, why 
 didn't you give me the truth? Is that the thing 
 men '11 never give a woman? I asked you, sittin' 
 that day under the gold poplars. Why would n't you 
 tell me then?" 
 
 "I was afraid." 
 
 "Of losin' me?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 After a long silence, she said faintly, "Ain't you 
 afraid of that now?" 
 
 "Yes, Sombra." 
 
 She spoke again: "You! that I was willin' to 
 live and die for, that I held so high above me, you 
 whose hand I felt hardly fit to hold, and wondered 
 how you could look at me, as if you was a king in 
 them old countries ?" 
 
 "My poor girl! my poor child!" 
 
 "All the while, that other was you?"
 
 THE SNOW 283 
 
 "That was I. A weak, sinful man. Too weak to 
 be willing to suffer for what he 'd done." 
 
 "And that poor lady that day on the beach, she 
 knew?" 
 
 "She knew. She came to forgive me." 
 
 "I didn't want forgiveness then. Some day, per- 
 haps, I '11 dare to ask for it again, on my knees." 
 
 "That man, your friend, that come to see you and 
 that you did n't bring to the house ?" 
 
 "Raynham? Yes. He knew. He was going to 
 quit the firm because he could n't bear, he said, to 
 see me like that. I did n't know what he meant then. 
 I do now." 
 
 "I thought you did n't ask him up to the house 
 because you might be ashamed o' me. Did he 
 quit you?" 
 
 "For a while. When I lost you he came back. 
 He 's been keeping the business together all the 
 winter." 
 
 "Then you ain't been all alone with your trouble? 
 You had one friend who knew?" 
 
 "Yes. And that was more than I deserved." 
 
 There was another long stillness. 
 
 Then he heard a small, low sound. 
 
 And its meaning for him was such that for a 
 minute he must hold to the lintel of the door. It was
 
 284 THE BRIDGE 
 
 a sound full of life and promise as the running of 
 the first thread of freed water in the spring. It was 
 the sound of Sombra's tears. 
 
 She was weeping wildly. Not as she had wept 
 before, in the desolation of her heart. But passion- 
 ately, warmly, as a woman weeps for a hurt to one 
 dearer than herself. 
 
 It was like a resurrection; like the first break of 
 the green life through the snows. He could not have 
 stirred. A great weakness smote him and kept him 
 motionless. But she was coming to him. 
 
 Through the snow and the ashes and the dead 
 leaves she came, crying aloud. She clung to his 
 shaking hands. She sank to her knees and drew him 
 down to her. He heard words at last through her 
 wild crying: 
 
 "All that long while, and me not to know! I don't 
 understand. I can't get it anyways straight. I can't 
 bother with rights and wrongs. You say you done 
 that bad thing. Oh, dear Alan, it don't matter! 
 Nothin' you could do would matter to me, so long 's 
 I could do you good. Dear, givin' 's all. Rights 
 and wrongs don't matter. It 's you that 's done it. 
 And above everything you could do, I love you. 
 But oh, my pore boy, my dear love! to bear it all 
 alone this great while! When I could have borne it 
 along with you!" 
 
 She was there, beside him, living and loving; near
 
 THE SNOW 285 
 
 as hands and feet; his own again. She forgot every- 
 thing but his need. And divinely from her great 
 ignorant heart she gavejto him. That door was once 
 more opened wide, in that deep fellowship and 
 compassion without which love can leave no more 
 than ashes in the snow. He yielded to her, dropped 
 to his knees beside her and hid his face. 
 
 All roads were ended here. They were at home. 
 For a little they remembered nothing of sin or grief, 
 only knowing that they were once more together. 
 
 After the sound of the trumpet must come a still- 
 ness. The stars, the snows, the trees, these alone 
 were the angels of their resurrection. 
 
 Then, having found her, through the hushed and 
 solemn woods he took her back to the farm. 
 
 x 
 
 Raynham, standing in the silence of his own small 
 office, partitioned off from the larger one, had been 
 reading a letter. 
 
 He had finished it now, and was staring out at his 
 high window. Between two twelve-story buildings 
 on the other side of the street he could see the lake, 
 gray, speckled with floating cakes of ice above 
 which wheeled the hungry gulls, and empty of any 
 shipping. It was all winter to the eye. But a 
 string of crows swung up from a mud bank and flew
 
 286 THE BRIDGE 
 
 high, with an air of purpose, toward the wooded 
 heights behind the city; they were cawing in a high- 
 pitched, excited note; they, long before the man, 
 were conscious of the year's turn and obedient to it. 
 
 Raynham stared at the horizon until it seemed to 
 recede, and he was looking at Tallis Island over 
 miles and miles of desolate water, not as he had 
 seen it in the autumn, but as it would be now, the 
 long beaches battered with the floe, the lagoons frozen, 
 and Morning House alone at last. 
 
 Yet even there, there would be consciousness in 
 the spears of pale green among the reed roots under 
 the ice, in the packed buds of the woolly willow of 
 that change. 
 
 He read again from the letter in his hand, which 
 was from Maclear: 
 
 . . . We shall never go back to the island any more. 
 I 've no wish for it, nor has she. Those empty rooms would 
 be unendurable, and the little hulls laid out to dry. All 
 that was good of our days there, we can keep in memory, 
 so that it '11 be always ours. But now we have changed. 
 And the place has not changed with us. It 's in the past. 
 We'll leave it there. 
 
 Once I was going to build a house for her on the island. 
 Now I know that house will never be built, anywhere. 
 And there was to be a golden room in it, just for her. A 
 fool and his fancies, you know, are hardly parted. I 'm 
 going to have a golden room in the house on Frontenac 
 Avenue. You said you would have a look at the wiring
 
 THE SNOW 287 
 
 before they laid the hardwood floors. Anyway, I know 
 you have the key, and go in and out, God bless you! 
 as I look for you to do when we 're there. So if you see 
 Smeaton's men inside with a lot of yellow stuff, don't chase 
 them out. 
 
 It was queer, wasn't it? that the little room she had 
 at the farm should have been a yellow one? It was walled 
 with yellow pine and strips of yellow-flowered paper, and 
 there were yellow curtains, and the quilt was all yellow 
 squares. It was gold when the lamp was burning. I saw 
 her first, as she lay asleep, in that gold light like memory. 
 
 When I brought her in out of the snow, I carried her 
 there. I stopped with h/er all night except when I went 
 down to look at Sal, who was taking hardly his return to 
 life after saving hers, poor lad. She has taken no harm. 
 The boy's hands are bad and heal slowly. But he's very 
 patient. 
 
 I don't know what I said or did n't say to you in my 
 first letters. It never occurred to me that you 'd be anxious 
 about any one but her. I 'm all right, Jack. When she 's 
 fit, I 'm hungry to get back to the city and get to work and 
 face the future. 
 
 Raynham laid the page down, drumming with 
 his fingers on the window-sill. Over the lake even- 
 ing was coming, and the gray light changed to one 
 not of earth. Change, change, everywhere, ceaseless 
 and implacable, the running of the sand, the drift- 
 ing of the mist, the covering of the snow, and all 
 building; building the stuff of the world, the life of 
 the heart, the soul of man. Raynham raised the 
 window, and into the warm air of the room slid a
 
 288 THE BRIDGE 
 
 blade of air keen as though he stood on a mountain. 
 He felt himself raised on a height. 
 
 "So he 's facing it at last," he said. "At last he 's 
 standing up to it. At last he 's taken it." 
 
 He drew down the window and went out through 
 the large office with its rows of covered tables and 
 hooded typewriters, and so to the door of another 
 room. He took out a key, opened the door, and went 
 in. 
 
 It was Maclear's office, where he had gone, that 
 day of summer, to think things out; where Moira had 
 been waiting for him. Perhaps, in the dust that lay 
 on everything, was some dust of the white violet she 
 had let fall. 
 
 Raynham went to the closed desk, looked at that 
 and at the empty chair. He said: "He '11 be sitting 
 there again next week, outwardly as if nothing had 
 happened. Queer, how our bodies hide things. 
 Like curtains. Queer, how time goes." 
 
 There, at Raynham's side was the place where 
 Moira had stood. There, on the carpet, was where 
 Maclear had lain. The dumb stuff kept no record, 
 and Raynham did not know. These things had only 
 builded in their hour, and with it were gone. 
 
 He went to a large locked folder in a rack, opened 
 it with another key. From among the plans it held 
 he selected one, drew it out, and carried it to the 
 window.
 
 THE SNOW 289 
 
 It was a plan of the Bersimis bridge. 
 
 He looked at it, studied it in every detail, then laid 
 it back once more in its place and put all away. 
 
 Something in Maclear's letter had told him that 
 this also had been faced at last. 
 
 He pulled out a drawer in the desk. All sorts of 
 odds and ends were there as Maclear had left them. 
 Raynham, 'burrowing, turned out faded envelops, 
 string, a cigar-box, broken-backed cigarettes, an in- 
 finite accumulation of nothings. Thrust down at 
 one side was what he had had in mind. 
 
 It was the framed photograph of a tall, ugly young 
 man. Under it was scrawled, "Al, from Gordy." 
 
 The photograph had been thrust down at the side 
 of the drawer with such violence that the glass over 
 it was broken and the metal frame crushed out of 
 shape. 
 
 With a very gentle touch, Raynham straightened 
 the frame. He spoke to the pictured face as if to 
 the original. 
 
 "He must have been regarded as worth it, Gor- 
 don," he said. "Such life, such suffering, poured 
 out to turn him! He was hard to turn. You'd 
 think it worth while. You 'd grudge him nothing, 
 not even your life. You were always a great giver, 
 Gordon. So 's she. It '11 be my job, and hers, to 
 help him to make it and keep it worth while." 
 
 He hesitated a minute, then deliberately set the
 
 290 THE BRIDGE 
 
 picture on the top of the desk, where it had stood 
 before. 
 
 This also. He knew that Maclear had done with 
 his forgetting; that he could forget no more than the 
 earth under the frost and snow forgot the seeds in the 
 furrows of her sorrow. 
 
 He took up the letter again. The page he lifted 
 began: 
 
 Did you know that a farmyard was such a pleasant place 
 to walk in? I didn't. The thaw was strong enough to 
 make you believe in spring. Canada- jays and crows were 
 quarreling somewhere, and the poultry were scratching 
 through the snow to the straw beneath. Every icicle had 
 a gold drop on the end of it, the cows were lowing, and 
 just then Mackerrow swung in with a load of logs from 
 the wood-lot, the runners shrieking at the turn, the whip 
 cracking, the big team jetting steam. I tell you, it was fine. 
 The girl on my arm clapped her hands and laughed out. 
 It 's the first time I Ve heard her laugh like that. Mrs. 
 Mackerrow heard her in the kitchen, and Sal. 
 
 We 've worn out a path on the sunny side of the barn, 
 she and I, pacing up and down while we talk of the future. 
 A thing we rarely did before. Everything we have and are 
 seems turned toward the future, as to a redemption, and the 
 present is just the bridge by which we are traveling to it. 
 I must tell you one thought of hers 1 . 
 
 We read in the paper an account of a sudden flood fol- 
 lowing an ice-jam up North on a river. A party of miners, 
 crossing by the single dangerous ford, were swept away, 
 and two were drowned. The account gave it that such 
 accidents were common there. She said, "There must be
 
 THE SNOW 291 
 
 plenty places like that in this country where life 's held 
 so light. What would have saved those poor men losing 
 their lives?" 
 
 I told her, a bridge, of course. Only there would be 
 nobody to build one in such a place until the railway 
 reached it. 
 
 "Yes," she said, "there might have been some one to set 
 a bridge there. There might be some one. There might be 
 you, Alan, when you 're rich enough." 
 
 Just the germ of a thought, Jack, but surely a divine one. 
 To save lives that way for the lives I lost? Could it be 
 done? I don't know. There 's no reason against it. And 
 a thought like that is a star to steer by. There 's time 
 enough. And I could train Sal to help me in it. The lad 
 would like it. Perhaps, in time, I might train a lad of 
 my own. . . . 
 
 Raynham laid the page down gently, as if some- 
 thing of Sombra, something of his friend, lingered 
 there with their thought. His thought was that he 
 must tell Moira that. 
 
 He also looked to the future and saw hope. 
 
 He gazed round the silent office to see that all was 
 in readiness for Maclear's return. His face softened 
 indescribably. He thought: "It'll be good to have 
 him back. And in time in time, we '11 all be 
 happy again. Gordon would not wish it otherwise. 
 Nor Moira. He'll have hard things to fight, hard 
 things to face, all the while. But there '11 be me. 
 And there '11 be his wife. We '11 keep it worth while. 
 He shall win out in the end."
 
 292 THE BRIDGE 
 
 He went out and shut the door. He was satisfied 
 in patience for his friend as for himself. 
 
 For love was there. And where there is love, 
 there is an exceeding patience. 
 
 Companied with these things, it is not difficult to 
 await the times of God.
 
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