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Page 37
"Oh, Derry!"
His heart was filled with gladness. She, too, was seeing what his eyes
saw in that wonderland. And she was feeling it. Her hand, seeking his
hand, crept into his palm, and the fingers of it clung to his fingers.
He could feel the thrill of the miracle passing through her, the
miracle of the open spaces, the miracle of the forests rising billow on
billow to the purple mists of the horizon, the miracle of the golden
Saskatchewan rolling slowly and peacefully in its slumbering sheen out
of that mighty mysteryland that reached to the lap of the setting sun.
He spoke to her of that land as she looked, wide-eyed, quick-breathing,
her fingers closing still more tightly about his. This was but the
beginning of the glory of the west and the north, he told her. Beyond
that low horizon, where the tree tops touched the sky were the
prairies--not the tiresome monotony which she had seen from the car
windows, but the wide, glorious, God-given country of the Northwest
with its thousands of lakes and rivers and its tens of thousands of
square miles of forests; and beyond those things, still farther, were
the foothills, and beyond the foothills the mountains. And in those
mountains the river down there had its beginning.
She looked up swiftly, her eyes brimming with the golden flash of the
sun. "It is wonderful! And just over there is the town!"
"Yes, and beyond the town are the cities."
"And off there--"
"God's country," said Keith devoutly.
Mary Josephine drew a deep breath. "And people still live in towns and
cities!" she exclaimed in wondering credulity. "I've dreamed of 'over
here,' Derry, but I never dreamed that. And you've had it for years and
years, while I--oh, Derry!"
And again those two words filled his heart with gladness, words of
loving reproach, atremble with the mysterious whisper of a great
desire. For she was looking into the west. And her eyes and her heart
and her soul were in the west, and suddenly Keith saw his way as though
lighted by a flaming torch. He came near to forgetting that he was
Conniston. He spoke of his dream, his desire, and told her that last
night--before she came--he had made up his mind to go. She had come to
him just in time. A little later and he would have been gone, buried
utterly away from the world in the wonderland of the mountains. And now
they would go together. They would go as he had planned to go, quietly,
unobtrusively; they would slip away and disappear. There was a reason
why no one should know, not even McDowell. It must be their secret.
Some day he would tell her why. Her heart thumped excitedly as he went
on like a boy planning a wonderful day. He could see the swifter beat
of it in the flush that rose into her face and the joy glowing
tremulously in her eyes as she looked at him. They would get ready
quietly. They might go tomorrow, the next day, any time. It would be a
glorious adventure, just they two, with all the vastness of that
mountain paradise ahead of them.
"We'll be pals," he said. "Just you and me, Mary Josephine. We're all
that's left."
It was his first experiment, his first reference to the information he
had gained in the letters, and swift as a flash Mary Josephine's eyes
turned up to him. He nodded, smiling. He understood their quick
questioning, and he held her hand closer and began to walk with her
down the slope.
"A lot of it came back last night and this morning, a lot of it," he
explained. "It's queer what miracles small things can work sometimes,
isn't it? Think what a grain of sand can do to a watch! This was one of
the small things." He was still smiling as he touched the scar on his
forehead. "And you, you were the other miracle. And I'm remembering. It
doesn't seem like seven or eight years, but only yesterday, that the
grain of sand got mixed up somewhere in the machinery in my head. And I
guess there was another reason for my going wrong. You'll understand,
when I tell you."
Had he been Conniston it could not have come from him more naturally,
more sincerely. He was living the great lie, and yet to him it was no
longer a lie. He did not hesitate, as shame and conscience might have
made him hesitate. He was fighting that something beautiful might be
raised up out of chaos and despair and be made to exist; he was
fighting for life in place of death, for happiness in place of grief,
for light in place of darkness--fighting to save where others would
destroy. Therefore the great lie was not a lie but a thing without
venom or hurt, an instrument for happiness and for all the things good
and beautiful that went to make happiness. It was his one great weapon.
Without it he would fail, and failure meant desolation. So he spoke
convincingly, for what he said came straight from the heart though it
was born in the shadow of that one master-falsehood. His wonder was
that Mary Josephine believed him so utterly that not for an instant was
there a questioning doubt in her eyes or on her lips.
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