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Place Beyond The Winds

<h2>CHAPTER XXV</h2> The pines and the hemlocks stood out sharply against a pink, throbbing sky in which the stars still shone faintly but brilliantly. It was five o'clock of a dim morning, and no one was astir in the In-Place as the little steamer indolently turned from the Big Bay into the Channel and headed for the wharf. Not a breath of air seemed stirring, and the stillness was unbroken except by the panting of the engines. Priscilla Glenn stood near the gangway of the boat. Now that she had left all her beautiful love and life, she was eager to hide, like a hurt and bruised thing, in the old, familiar home. Leaning her poor, tired head against the post near her, she thought of the desolate wreck behind, and the tears came to the deep, true eyes. "I could have done—nothing else!" she murmured, as if to comfort the sad thing she was. "It had to be! Margaret knew that; she understood. By now she is as bereft as I; poor, dear love! Oh! it seems, just sometimes it seems, like an army of men on one side and all of us women on the other. Between us lies the great battlefield, and they, the men, are trying to fight alone—fight our battle as well as theirs. And—they cannot! they cannot!" Just then the boat touched the wharf, and a sleepy man, a stranger to Priscilla, materialized and looked at her queerly. "For the Lodge?" he grunted. "Yes—I suppose so. Yes, the Lodge." "Up yonder." Then he turned to the freight. Once she was on the Green, Priscilla paused and looked about. "For which?" Then she smiled a ghost of her bright, sunny smile. "My father's doors are shut to me," she sighed; "I cannot go to the Lodge, yet! I must go—to——" Something touched her hand, and she looked down. It was Farwell's dog, the old one, the one who used to play with Priscilla when she was a little girl. "You dear!" she cried, dropping beside him; "You've come to show me the way. Beg, Tony, beg like a good fellow. I have a bit of cake for you!" Clumsily, heavily, the old collie tried to respond, but of late he had been excused from acting; and he was old, old. "Then take it, Tony, take it without pay. That comes of being a doggie. You ought to be grateful that you are a dog, and—need not pay!" It was clear to her now that Farwell's home must be her first shelter, and taking up her suit-case she passed over the Green and took the path leading to the master's house. Some one had been before her. Some one who had swept the hearth, lighted a fire, and set the breakfast table. Pine had taken Toky's place and was vying with that deposed oriental in whole-souled service. Priscilla pushed the ever-unlatched door open and went inside. The bare living-room had been transformed. John Boswell had transferred the comfort, without the needless luxury, from the town home to the In-Place—books, pictures, rugs, the winged chair and an equally easy one across the hearth. And, yes, there was her own small rocker close by, as if, in their detachment, they still remembered her and missed her and were—ready for her coming! Priscilla noiselessly took off her wraps and sat down, glad to rest again in the welcoming chair. She swayed back and forth, her closely folded arms across her fast-beating heart. She kept her face turned toward the door through which she knew the men would enter. She struggled for control, for a manner which would disarm their shock at seeing her; but never in her life had she felt more defeated, more helplessly at bay. The early morning light, streaming through the broad eastern window, struck full across her where she sat in the low rocker; and so Boswell and Farwell came upon her. They stopped short on the threshold and each, in his way, sought to account for the apparition. The brave smile upon Priscilla's face broke and fled miserably. "I—I've been doshed!" she cried in a last effort at bravado, and then, covering her face with her hands, she wept hysterically, repeating again and again, "I've come home, come home—to—no home!" They were beside her at once. Boswell's hand rested on the bowed head; Farwell's on the back of her chair. "Dear, bright Butterfly!" whispered Boswell comfortingly; "it has come to grief in the Garden." "Oh! I wanted to learn, and oh! Master Farwell, I said I was willing to suffer, and I have, I have!" Then she looked up and her unflinching courage returned. "I was tired!" she moaned; "tired and hungry." "After breakfast you will explain—only as much as you choose, child." This from Farwell. "Make the toast for us, Priscilla. I remember how you used to brown it without blackening it. Boswell always gets dreaming on the second side of the slice." After the strange meal Priscilla told very little, but both men read volumes in her pale, thin face and understanding eyes. "Damn them!" thought Farwell; "they have taken it out of her. I knew they would; but they have not conquered her!" Boswell thoughtfully considered her when her eyes were turned from him. "She learned," he thought; "suffered and learned; but when she gets her breath she will go back. The In-Place cannot hold her." Then they told her of the Kenmore folk. "Your father has had a stroke, Priscilla," Farwell said in reply to her question; "it has made him blind. Long Jean cares for him. He will have no other near him." "And—he never wants me?" Priscilla whispered. "No; but he needs you!" Boswell muttered. "You must let your velvety wings brush his dark life; the touch will comfort him." "And old Jerry?" Farwell leaned forward to poke the fire. "Old Jerry," said he, "has gone mildly—mad. All day he sits dressed in his best, ready to start for Jerry-Jo's. He fancies that scapegoat of his has a mansion and fortune, and is expecting his arrival. He amuses himself by packing and unpacking a mangy old carpet-bag. Mary McAdam looks after him and the village youngsters play with him. It's rather a happy ending, after all." Many a time after that Priscilla packed and unpacked the old carpet-bag, while Jerry rambled on of his great and splendid lad to the "Miss from the States." "It's weak I am to-day, ma'am," he would say, "but to-morrow, to-morrow! 'Tis the Secret Portage I'll make for; the Fox is a bit too tricky for my boat—a fine boat, ma'am. I'm thinking the Big Bay may be a trifle rough, but the boat's a staunch one. Jerry-Jo's expecting me; but he'll understand." "I am sure he will be glad to see you, sir." Priscilla learned to play the sad game. The children taught her and loved her, and all the quiet village kept her secret. Mary McAdam claimed her, but Priscilla clung to the two men who meant the only comfort she could know. They never questioned her; never intruded upon her sad, and often pitiful, reserve; but they yearned over her and cheered her as best they could. Priscilla's visits to her father's house were often dramatic. At first the sound of her voice disturbed and excited the blind man pathetically. "Eh? eh?" he stormed, holding to Long Jean's hand; "who comes in my door?" "Oh! a lass—from the States," Jean replied with a reassuring pat on the bony shoulder. "From the States?" suspiciously. "Aye. She's taken training in one of them big hospitables, and is a friend to the crooked gentleman who bides with Master Farwell. The lass comes to give me lessons in my trade." Jean had a touch of humour. "I'll have no fandangoing with me!" asserted Glenn, settling back in his chair. "Old ways are good enough for me, Jean, and remember that, if you value your place. I want no woman about me who has notions different from what God Almighty meant her to have. Larning is woman's curse. Give 'em larning, I've always held, and you've headed 'em for perdition." But Priscilla won him gradually, after he had become accustomed to her disturbing voice. He would not have her touch him physically. She seemed to rouse in him a strange unrest when she came near him, but eventually he accepted her as a diversion and utilized her for his own hidden need. One day, with a hint of spring in the air, he reached out a lean hand toward the window near which Jean had placed him, and said: "Woman, are you here?" "Jean's gone—erranding." The old mother-word attracted Glenn's attention. "Eh?" he questioned. "To the village. I'm waiting until she comes back. Can I do anything for you, sir?" "No. Is—is it a sunny day?" "Glorious. The ice is melting now—in the shady places." "I thought I felt the warmth. 'Tis cold and drear sitting forever in darkness." "I am sure it must be—terrible." But Glenn resented pity. "God's will is never terrible!" he flung back. Then: "Are you one—who got larning?" "I—learned to read, sir." "And much—good it's done you—the larning! I warrant ye'd be better off without it. Women are. Good women are content with God's way. My wife was. Always willing, was she, to follow. God was enough for her—God and me!" "I wonder!" "Eh? What was that?" "Nothing, sir. May I read to you?" "Is the Book there?" "Right here on the stand. What shall I read?" "There's one verse as haunts me at times; find it in Acts—the seventeenth, I think—and along about the twenty-third verse. I used to conjure what it might mean more than was good for me. It haunts me now, though I ain't doubting but what the meaning will come to me, some day. Them as sits in darkness often gets spiritual leadings." And Priscilla read: "'For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To the Unknown God. Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, him I declare unto you?'" A silence fell between the old, blind father and the stranger-girl looking yearningly into his face. "I've conned it this way and that," Glenn said, with his oratorical manner claiming him. "It might be that some worship an Unknown God and the true God might pass by and set things straight. There be altars and altars, and sometimes even my God seems——" "An Unknown God?" Priscilla asked tenderly. "That must be such a lonely feeling." "No!" almost shrieked Nathaniel, as if the suggestion insulted him; "no! The true God declared himself to me long since. But what do you make of it, young Miss?" Priscilla turned her eyes to the open, free outer world, where the sunshine was and the stirring of spring. "Sometimes," she whispered, "I love to think of God coming down from all the shrines and altars of the world, and walking with his children—in the Garden! They need him so. I do not like altars or shrines; the Garden is the holiest place for God to be!" "Thou blasphemer!" Glenn struggled to an upright position and his sightless eyes were fixed upon his child. "Wouldst thou desecrate the holy of holies, the altars of the living God?" "If he is a living God he will not stay upon an altar; he will come and walk with his children!" The tone of the absorbed voice reached where heretofore it had never touched. "I'll have none of thee!" commanded Nathaniel, his face dangerously purple. "Your words are of the—the devil! Leave me! leave me!" And for the second time Priscilla was ordered from her father's house. It did not matter. It was all so useless, and the future was so blank. Still, to go back to Master Farwell's just then was impossible, and Priscilla turned toward the wood road leading to the Far Hill Place. She had no plan, no purpose. She was drifting, drifting, and could not see her way. The bright sun touched her comfortingly. In the shadow it was chilly; but the red rock was warm and luring. And so she came to the open space and the almost forgotten shrine where once she had raised her Strange God. She sat down upon a fallen tree and looked over the little, many-islanded bay to the Secret Portage. Through that she seemed to pass yearningly, and her eyes grew large and strained. Then she stretched out her arms, her young, empty arms. "My Garden!" she called; "my Garden, my dear, dear love and Margaret's God! Margaret's and mine!" And so she sat for a while longer. Then, because the chill air crept closer and closer, she arose and faced the old, bleached skull. The winters had killed the sheltering vines that once hid it from all eyes but hers. It stood bare and hideous, as if demanding that she again worship it. A frenzy overpowered Priscilla. That whitened, dead thing brought back memories that hurt and stung by their very sweetness. She rushed to the spot and seized the forked stick upon which the skull rested. "This for all—Unknown Gods!" she cried in breathless passion, and dashed the skull to the ground. "And this! and this!" She trampled it. "They shall not keep you upon shrines! They shall not keep you hidden from all in the Garden!" With that she took a handful of the shattered god and flung it far and wide, with her blazing eyes fixed on the Secret Portage. Standing so, she looked like a priestess of old defying all falseness and traditional wrong. Among the trees Richard Travers gazed upon the scene with a kind of horror gripping him. He was not a superstitious man, but he was a worn and weary one, and he had come to the Far Hill Place, two days before, because, after much searching, he had failed to find Priscilla Glynn, and his love was hurt and desperate. He had wanted to hide and suffer where no eyes could penetrate. But he had discovered that for a man to return to his boyhood was but to undergo the torture of those who are haunted by lost spirits. It had been damnable—that dreary, dismantled house back on the hill! The nights had maddened him and left him unable to cope intelligently with the days. Nothing comforting had been there. The pale boy he once had been taunted him with memories of lowered ideals, unfilled promise and purpose. He had travelled a long distance from the Far Hill Place, and he was going back to fight it out—somehow, somewhere. He would stop at Master Farwell's and then take the night steamer for the old battle-ground. And just at that moment, in the open space, he saw the strange sight that stopped his breath and heart for an instant. Of course his wornout senses were being tricked. He had known of such cases, and was now thoroughly alarmed. Like a man in delirium, he walked into the open and confronted the fascinated gaze of the girl for whom he had been searching for weeks. "How came—you here?" he asked in a voice from which normal emotions were eliminated. "And—you?" she echoed. They came a step nearer, their hands outstretched in a poor, blind groping for solution and reality. "Why—I am—I meant to tell you—some day. I am Priscilla Glenn—not Glynn—Priscilla Glenn of—Lonely Farm." "My God!" Travers came a step nearer, his face set and grim. "Of course! I see it now—the dance! Don't you remember? The dance at the Swiss village?" "And the—the tune that made me cry. Who—are——How did you know that tune? How did you know—the In-Place?" Their hands touched and clung now, desperately. Together they must find their way out. "I am—I was—the boy of the Far Hill Place. I played for you—once—to dance—right here!" Something seemed snapping in Priscilla's brain. "Yes," she whispered, breathing hard and quick. "I remember now: you taught me music, and—and you taught me—love, but you told me not to let them kill my ideal; and, oh! I haven't! I haven't!" She shut her eyes and reeled forward. She did not faint, but for a moment her senses refused to accept impressions. Travers knelt and caught her to him as she fell. Her dear head was upon his knee once more, and he pressed his lips to the wonderful hair from which the little hat had fallen. Then her eyes opened, but her lips trembled. "You—came all the way from the Place Beyond the Winds, little girl, to show me my ideal again; to strike your blow—for women." Travers was whispering. "Your ideal? But no, dear love. Your ideal is back there—in the Garden." "And yours? I—I do not understand, Priscilla. I am still dazed. What Garden?" "The big world, my dear man; your world." "My blessed child! Do not look like that. Do you think I'm going back without you? I've been looking for—Priscilla Glynn—fool that I was! And you were—great heavens! You were the little nurse in St. Albans!" "Yes—and you and I—stood by Jerry-Jo McAlpin's bed—you and I! That was his secret." "Priscilla, what do you mean?" Then she told him, clinging to him, fearing that he might fall from her hold as she had once fallen from his, on the mountain across the sea. "And you danced before my eyes as only one woman on earth can dance—and I did not know! Tricked by a name and—and the change in me! You were always the same—the flame-spirit that I first saw—here!" "And you played—that tune, and you were divinely good; and I—I did not know." "But we drifted straight to each other, my girl!" "Only—to part." "To part? Never! It's past the Dreamer's Rock for us, my sweet, and out to the open sea. We'll slip our moorings to-night, and send word after! I must have you, and at once. I know what it means to see you escaping my hold. Flame-spirits are elusive." "And—and Margaret?" "She—needs you. A fortnight ago I saw her, and this is what she said, smiling her old, brave smile: 'I think I could bear it better if her dear, shining head was in sight. Greater love hath no woman! Find her and bring her back!' That's your place, my sweet. Out there where the fight is on. Such as you can show us—that 'tis no fight between men and women, but one against ignorance and tradition. You'll trust yourself to me, dear girl?" <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/gs05.jpg" alt=""/></div> <h3>[Illustration:"'It's past the Dreamer's Rock for us, my sweet, and out to the open sea'"]</h3> "I did—long ago!" "To think"—Travers was gaining control of himself; the shock, the readjustment, had been so sudden that sensation returned slowly—"to think, dear blunderer, of your coming among us all, striking your blow, and then rushing to your In-Place! But love is mightier than thou; mightier than all else!" "Not mightier than honour—such honour as Margaret knows!" Then fiercely: "What right have I to my—joy, when she——" "She told me that only by your happiness being consummated could she hope for peace." Travers's voice was low and reverent. "What—a girl she is!" Priscilla faltered. "The All Woman." "Yes, the All Woman." The sun began to drop behind the tall hemlocks. Priscilla shivered in the arms that held her. "Little girl, I wish I could wrap you in the old red cape you wore once, before the shrine." "It is gone now, like the shrine. Oh! my love, my love, to think of the Garden makes me live again." The fancy caught Travers's imagination. "The Garden!" 'Twas a day for dreamy wandering, now that they had come to a cleared space from which they could see light. "The Garden, with its flowers and weeds." "And its men and women!" added Priscilla, her eyes full of gladness. "Oh! long ago, I told Master Farwell that I felt Kenmore was only my stopping-place; I feel it now so surely." "Yes, my sweet, but you and I will return here to polish our ideals and catch our breaths." "In the Place Beyond the Winds, dear man?" "Exactly! Those old Indians had a genius for names." "And in the Garden—what are we to do?" Priscilla asked, her eyes growing more practical. "They will have none of—Priscilla Glynn, you know. And you, dear heart, what will they do to you, now that you have defied their code?" "Priscilla Glynn has done her best and is—gone! There will be a Priscilla Travers with many a stern duty before her." "Yes, but you?" "I shall try to keep your golden head in sight, little girl! For the rest—I have a small income—my father's. I must tell you about him and my mother, some day; and I shall write—write; and men and women may read what they might not be willing to listen to." "I see! And oh! how rich and bright the way on ahead looks! Just when I thought the clouds were crushing me, they opened and I saw——" "What, Priscilla?" "You!" "And now," Travers got upon his feet and drew her up; "do you know what is going to happen?" "Can anything more happen to-day?" "We are going to Master Farwell's, you and I. We are going to take him with us to the little chapel down the Channel; there we'll leave Priscilla Glenn, and, in her place, bring Priscilla Travers forth." The colour rose to the thin, radiant face. "And may we take John Boswell, too?" "Boswell? Is he here?" "Yes, with my Master Farwell." Travers rapidly put loose ends of the past together, then exclaimed: "God bless him; God bless Master Farwell!" "I only know"—Priscilla's eyes were dim—"I only know—they are good men—both!" "Yes, both! And to-night," Travers came back to the present, "I will take my wife away with me on the steamer." "A poor, vagabond wife. Nothing but a heart full of love—as baggage." "The Garden is a rich place, my love." "And one can get so much for so little there." Priscilla meant to hold to her dear old joke. "And so little—for so much!" "That's not the language of the Garden, good man!" It was so easy to play, now that Travers was leading the way from the wrecked shrine. "You are right, my girl!" Then Travers stopped and faced her, his eyes glowing with love and courage. "And to-morrow—is not yet touched!" he said. THE END <hr style='width: 45%;' /> BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> Joyce of the North Woods Princess Rags and Tatters A Son of the Hills Janet of the Dunes A Little Dusky Hero Meg and the Others Camp Brave Pine </div> </div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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