The Place Beyond the Winds. Harriet T. Comstock
than he could bear. Then memory added fuel to the present. It was that man who had conjured up some kind of opposition to his mother—had made living problems harder for her until she had won the confidence of others. The man must be, Travers concluded, a fanatic and an ignoramus, and to think of him holding power over that sprite of the woods!
He could not quite see how he might help the girl, but, lying there, her dancing image flitting before his pitying eyes, he meant to outwit the rough father in some way, and bring into the child's life a bit of brightness. Then he smiled and his easy good nature returned.
"I'll get her to dance for me, never fear! I'll teach her to love music, and I'll tell her stories. I must get her to explain about the lure of the States. What on earth could the little beggar have meant? It sounded as if she thought America had some sinister clutch on the Dominion. And those infernal-sounding words!"
Travers shook with laughter. "That 'dosh' was about the most blasphemous thing I ever listened to. In a short space of time that child managed to cram in more new ideas, words, and acts than any one I've ever met before. I shouldn't wonder if she proves a character."
CHAPTER III
The day of warmth and song and dance changed to a cool evening. There was a glowing sunset which faded into a clear, starry night.
Dick Travers, encased in a heavy sweater, lingered, after the light failed, on the broad piazza facing the still purpled sky, and looked out toward the Georgian Bay, which was hidden from sight by the ridge of hill through which the Fox and Secret Portages cut. The mood of the afternoon had fallen, as had the day, into calmness and restfulness. The fiddle, which was never far from Travers, lay now beside him on the deep porch swing, and every few moments he took it up and began an air that broke off almost at once, either to run into another, or into silence.
"Choppy," muttered Doctor Ledyard as he sat across the hearth from his hostess and looked now at her fair, tranquil face and then at the cheerful fire of hemlock boughs.
"He's always happiest when he's—choppy." Helen Travers smiled. "I wonder why I take your words as I take your pills, without question?"
"You know what's good for you."
"And so you really think there is no doubt about Dick? He can enter college this fall?"
"As sure as any man can be. He'll always be a trifle lame probably, though that will be less noticeable when he learns to forget the cane and crutch periods; as for his health—it's ripping, for him!"
"How wonderful you have been; what a miracle you have performed. When I recall——"
"Don't, Helen! It's poor business retracing a hard road unless you go back to pick something up."
"That's why—I must go back. Doctor Ledyard, I must tell you something! Now that Dick's semi-exile and mine are to end in the common highway, he and—you must know why I have done many things—will you listen?"
From under Ledyard's shaggy brows his keen eyes flashed. There had been a time when he had hoped Helen Travers would love him; he had loved her since her husband's death, but he had never spoken, for he knew intuitively that to do so would be to risk the only thing of which he was, then, sure—her trusting friendship. He had not dared put that to the test even for the greater hope. That was why he had been able to share her lonely life in the Canadian wilds—she had never been disturbed by a doubt of him. And this comradeship, safe and assured, was the one luxury he permitted himself in a world where he was looked upon as a hard, an almost cruel, man.
"I do not want you to tell anything in order to explain your actions now, or ever. I am confident that under all circumstances you would act wisely. You are the most normal woman I ever knew."
"Thank you. But I still must speak—more for Dick than for you. I need your help for him."
Outside, the fiddle was repeating again and again a nocturne that Helen particularly loved.
"Dick is not—my son!" she said quickly and softly from out the shadows. She was rarely abrupt, and her words startled Ledyard into alertness. He got up and drew his chair close to hers.
"What did you say?" he whispered, keeping his eyes upon her lowered face.
"I said—Dick is not my son."
"And—whose is he—may I ask?"
There was a tenseness in the question. Now that he saw the gravity of the confession Ledyard wished beyond all else to cut quick and deep and then bind up the wound.
"He is the child of—my husband, and—another woman."
In the hush that followed, Dick's fiddle, running now through a delicious strain of melody, seemed like a current bearing them on.
"Perhaps you had better—tell me," Ledyard was saying, and his words blended strangely with the tune. "Yes, I am sure you ought to tell me."
Helen Travers, sitting in her low wicker chair, did not move. Her delicate face was resting on the tips of her clasped hands, and her long, loose, white gown seemed to gather and hold the red glow of the fire.
"I suppose I have done Dick a bitter wrong, but at first, you know, even you thought he could not live and so it would not have mattered, and then I—I learned to love the helpless little chap as women of my sort do who have to make their own lives as best they may. He clung to me so desparately, and, you see, as he grew older I either had to accept his belief in me or—or—take his father from him. They were such close friends, Dick's father and he! And now—I must lay everything low, and I am wondering what will come of it all. He is such a strange fellow; our life apart has left him—well, so different! How will he take it?"
Whatever her own personal sorrow was, Helen Travers made no moan, exacted no sympathy. She had come alone to the parting of the ways, and she had thought only for the boy whom she had mothered tenderly and successfully. Ledyard did not interrupt the gentle flow of her thoughts. There was time; he would not startle or hurry her, although her first statement had shocked and surprised him beyond measure.
"I've always thought of myself as like one of those poor Asiatic hornbills," she was saying. "It seems to me that all my life long some one has walled me up in a nice, safe nest and fed me through my longings and desires. I cannot get to life first hand. I'm not stupid exactly, but I am terribly limited." Helen paused, then went on more rapidly: "First it was my father. He and I travelled after mother's death continually, and alone. He educated me and interpreted life for me; he was a man of the world, I suppose, but he managed to keep me most unworldly wise. Of course I knew, abstractly, the lights and shadows; but I wonder if you will believe me when I tell you that, until after my marriage, I never suspected that—that certain codes of honour and dishonour had place in the lives of those closest to me? The evil of the world was classified and pigeon-holed for me. I even had ambition to get out of my walled-up condition and help some mystical people, detached and far from my safe, clean corner. Father left me more money than was good for any young woman, and my simple impulse was to use it properly."
"You were very young?" Ledyard interrupted.
Helen Travers shook her head.
"Not very. I was twenty-four when I married. I had never had but one intimate friend in my life, and to her I went at my father's death. It was her brother I married—John Travers."
Ledyard nodded his head; he knew of the Traverses—the older generation.
"This thing concerning Dick occurred some three or four years before my marriage. My wedding was a very quiet one; it was not reported, and that accounted for Dick's mother—Elizabeth Thornton—not knowing of it.
"It seems that there had been an alliance between John Travers and—and Dick's mother, and it had been terminated some time before he met me, by mutual consent. There was the child—Dick. The