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Page 34
She linked her arm in his as they walked into the big room, snuggling
her head against his shoulder so that, leaning over, his lips were
buried in one of the soft, shining coils of her hair. And she was
making plans, enumerating them on the tips of her fingers. If he had
business outside, she was going with him. Wherever he went she was
going. There was no doubt in her mind about that. She called his
attention to a trunk that had arrived while he slept, and assured him
she would be ready for outdoors by the time he had opened his chest.
She had a little blue suit she was going to wear. And her hair? Did it
look good enough for his friends to see? She had put it up in a hurry.
"It is beautiful, glorious," he said.
Her face pinked under the ardency of his gaze. She put a finger to the
tip of his nose, laughing at him. "Why, Derry, if you weren't my
brother I'd think you were my lover! You said that as though you meant
it TERRIBLY much. Do you?"
He felt a sudden dull stab of pain, "Yes, I mean it. It's glorious. And
so are you, Mary Josephine, every bit of you."
On tiptoe she gave him the warm sweetness of her lips again. And then
she ran away from him, joy and laughter in her face, and disappeared
into her room. "You must hurry or I shall beat you," she called back to
him.
XIII
In his own room, with the door closed and locked, Keith felt again that
dull, strange pain that made his heart sick and the air about him
difficult to breathe.
"IF YOU WEREN'T MY BROTHER."
The words beat in his brain. They were pounding at his heart until it
was smothered, laughing at him and taunting him and triumphing over him
just as, many times before, the raving voices of the weird wind-devils
had scourged him from out of black night and arctic storm. HER BROTHER!
His hand clenched until the nails bit into his flesh. No, he hadn't
thought of that part of the fight! And now it swept upon him in a
deluge. If he lost in the fight that was ahead of him, his life would
pay the forfeit. The law would take him, and he would hang. And if he
won--she would be his sister forever and to the end of all time! Just
that, and no more. His SISTER! And the agony of truth gripped him that
it was not as a brother that he saw the glory in her hair, the glory in
her eyes and face, and the glory in her slim little, beautiful
body--but as the lover. A merciless preordination had stacked the cards
against him again. He was Conniston, and she was Conniston's sister.
A strong man, a man in whom blood ran red, there leaped up in him for a
moment a sudden and unreasoning rage at that thing which he had called
fate. He saw the unfairness of it all, the hopelessness of it, the
cowardly subterfuge and trickery of life itself as it had played
against him, and with tightly set lips and clenched hands he called
mutely on God Almighty to play the game square. Give him a chance! Give
him just one square deal, only one; let him see a way, let him fight a
man's fight with a ray of hope ahead! In these red moments hope
emblazoned itself before his eyes as a monstrous lie. Bitterness rose
in him until he was drunk with it, and blasphemy filled his heart.
Whichever way he turned, however hard he fought, there was no chance of
winning. From the day he killed Kirkstone the cards had been stacked
against him, and they were stacked now and would be stacked until the
end. He had believed in God, he had believed in the inevitable ethics
of the final reckoning of things, and he had believed strongly that an
impersonal Something more powerful than man-made will was behind him in
his struggles. These beliefs were smashed now. Toward them he felt the
impulse of a maddened beast trampling hated things under foot. They
stood for lies--treachery--cheating--yes, contemptible cheating! It
was impossible for him to win. However he played, whichever way he
turned, he must lose. For he was Conniston, and she was Conniston's
sister, AND MUST BE TO THE END OF TIME.
Faintly, beyond the door, he heard Mary Josephine singing. Like a bit
of steel drawn to a tension his normal self snapped back into place.
His readjustment came with a lurch, a subtle sort of shock. His hands
unclenched, the tense lines in his face relaxed, and because that God
Almighty he had challenged had given to him an unquenchable humor, he
saw another thing where only smirking ghouls and hypocrites had rent
his brain with their fiendish exultations a moment before. It was
Conniston's face, suave, smiling, dying, triumphant over life, and
Conniston was saying, just as he had said up there in the cabin on the
Barren, with death reaching out a hand for him, "It's queer, old top,
devilish queer--and funny!"
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