The Greatest Works of James Oliver Curwood (Illustrated Edition). James Oliver Curwood
knocked lightly to give some warning of his presence, and entered. Meleese was gone. He closed the door behind him, scarce believing his eyes. Then at the far end of the room he saw a curtain, undulating slightly as if from the movement of a person on the other side of it.
"Meleese!" he called softly.
White and dripping with snow, his face bloodless in the tense excitement of the moment, he stood with his arms half reaching out when the curtain was thrust aside and the girl stood before him. At first she did not recognize him in his ghostly storm-covered disguise. But before the startled cry that was on her lips found utterance the fear that had blanched her face gave place to a swift sweeping flood of color. For a space there was no word between them as they stood separated by the breadth of the room, Howland with his arms held out to her in pleading silence, Meleese with her hands clutched to her bosom, her throat atremble with strange sobbing notes that made no more sound than the fluttering of a bird's wing.
And Howland, as he came across the room to her, found no words to say--none of the things that he had meant to whisper to her, but drew her to him and crushed her close to his breast, knowing that in this moment nothing could tell her more eloquently than the throbbing of his own heart, the passionate pressure of his face to her face, of his great love which seemed to stir into life the very silence that encompassed them.
It was a silence broken after a moment by a short choking cry, the quick-breathing terror of a face turned suddenly up to him robbed of its flush and quivering with a fear that still found no voice in words. He felt the girl's arms straining against him for freedom; her eyes were filled with a staring, questioning horror, as though his presence had grown into a thing of which she was afraid. The change was tonic to him. This was what he had expected---the first terror at his presence, the struggle against his will, and there surged back over him the forces he had reserved for this moment. He opened his arms and Meleese slipped from them, her hands clutched again in the clinging drapery of her bosom.
"I have come for you, Meleese," he said as calmly as though his arrival had been expected. "Jean is my prisoner. I forced him to drive me to the old cabin up on the mountain, and he is waiting there with the dogs. We will start back to-night--now." Suddenly he sprang to her again, his voice breaking in a low pleading cry. "My God, don't you see now how I love you?" he went on, taking her white face between his two hands. "Don't you understand, Meleese? Jean and I have fought--he is bound hand and foot up there in the cabin--and I am waiting for you--for you--" He pressed her face against him, her lips so close that he could feel their quavering breath. "I have come to fight for you--if you won't go," he whispered tensely. "I don't know why your people have tried to kill me, I don't know why they want to kill me, and it makes no difference to me now. I want you. I've wanted you since that first glimpse of your face through the window, since the fight on the trail--every minute, every hour, and I won't give you up as long as I'm alive. If you won't go with me--if you won't go now--to-night--" He held her closer, his voice trembling in her hair. "If you won't go--I'm going to stay with you!"
There was a thrillingly decisive note in his last words, a note that carried with it more than all he had said before, and as Meleese partly drew away from him again she gave a sharp cry of protest.
"No--no--no--" she panted, her hands clutching at his arm. "You must go back now--now--" She pushed him toward the door, and as he backed a step, looking down into her face, he saw the choking tremble of her white throat, heard again the fluttering terror in her breath. "They will kill you if they find you here," she urged. "They think you are dead--that you fell through the ice and were drowned. If you don't believe me, if you don't believe that I can never go with you, tell Jean--"
Her words seemed to choke her as she struggled to finish.
"Tell Jean what?" he questioned softly.
"Will you go--then?" she cried with sobbing eagerness, as if he already understood her. "Will you go back if Jean tells you everything--everything about me--about--"
"No," he interrupted.
"If you only knew--then you would go back, and never see me again. You would understand--"
"I will never understand," He interrupted again. "I say that it is you who do not understand, Meleese! I don't care what Jean would tell me. Nothing that has ever happened can make me not want you. Don't you understand? Nothing, I say--nothing that has happened--that can ever happen--unless--"
For a moment he stopped, looking straight into her eyes.
"Nothing--nothing in the world, Meleese," he repeated almost in a whisper, "unless you did not tell me the truth back on the trail at Wekusko when you said that it was not a sin to love you."
"And if I tell you--if I confess that it is a sin, that I lied back there--then will you go?" she demanded quickly.
Her eyes flamed on him with a strange light.
"No," he said calmly. "I would not believe you."
"But it is the truth. I lied--lied terribly to you. I have sinned even more terribly, and--and you must go. Don't you understand me now? If some one should come--and find you here--"
"There would be a fight," he said grimly. "I have come prepared to fight." He waited a moment, and in the silence the brown head in front of him dropped slowly and he saw a tremor pass through the slender form, as if it had been torn by an instant's pain. The pallor had gone from Howland's face. The mute surrender in the bowed head, the soft sobbing notes that he heard now in the girl's breath, the confession that he read in her voiceless grief set his heart leaping, and again he drew her close into his arms and turned her face up to his own. There was no resistance now, no words, no pleading for him to go; but in her eyes he saw the prayerful entreaty with which she had come to him on the Wekusko trail, and in the quivering red mouth the same torture and love and half-surrender that had burned themselves into his soul there. Love, triumph, undying faith shone in his eyes, and he crushed her face closer until the lovely mouth lay pouted like a crimson rose for him to kiss.
"You--you told me something that wasn't true--once--back there," he whispered, "and you promised that you wouldn't do it again. You haven't sinned--in the way that I mean, and in the way that you want me to believe." His arms tightened still more about her, and his voice was suddenly filled with a tense quick eagerness. "Why don't you tell me everything?" he asked. "You believe that if I knew certain things I would never want to see you again, that I would go back into the South. You have told me that. Then--if you want me to go--why don't you reveal these things to me? If you can't do that, go with me to-night. We will go anywhere--to the ends of the earth--"
He stopped at the look that had come into her face. Her eyes were turned to the window. He saw them filled with a strange terror, and involuntarily his own followed them to where the storm was beating softly against the window-pane. Close to the lighted glass was pressed a man's face. He caught a flashing glimpse of a pair of eyes staring in at them, of a thick, wild beard whitened by the snow. He knew the face. When life seemed slipping out of his throat he had looked up into it that night of the ambush on the Great North Trail. There was the same hatred, the same demoniac fierceness in it now.
With a quick movement Howland sprang away from the girl and leveled his revolver to where the face had been. Over the shining barrel he saw only the taunting emptiness of the storm. Scarcely had the face disappeared when there came the loud shout of a man, the hoarse calling of a name, and then of another, and after that the quick, furious opening of the outer door.
Howland whirled, his weapon pointing to the only entrance. The girl was ahead of him and with a warning cry he swung the muzzle of his gun upward. In a moment she had pushed the bolt that locked the room from the inside, and had leaped back to him, her face white, her breath breaking in fear. She spoke no word, but with a moan of terror caught him by the arm and pulled him past the light and beyond the thick curtain that had hidden her when he had entered the room a few minutes before. They were in a second room, palely lighted by a mass of coals gleaming through the open door of a box stove, and with a second window looking out into the thick night. Fiercely she dragged him to this window, her fingers biting deep into the flesh of his arm.
"You must go--through this!" she cried chokingly. "Quick! O,