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Page 50
At that, with a riotous little laugh of joy, Mary Josephine swiftly
unbound her hair and let it smother about his face and shoulders.
"Sometimes I have a terribly funny thought, Derry," she whispered. "If
we hadn't always been sweethearts, back there at home, and if you
hadn't always liked my hair, and kissed me, and told me I was pretty,
I'd almost think you weren't my brother!"
Keith laughed and was glad that her hair covered his face. During those
wonderful first days of the summer they were inseparable, except when
matters of business took Keith away. During these times he prepared for
eventualities. The Keith properties in Prince Albert, he estimated,
were worth at least a hundred thousand dollars, and he learned from
McDowell that they would soon go through a process of law before being
turned over to his fortunate inheritors. Before that time, however, he
knew that his own fate would be sealed one way or the other, and now
that he had Mary Josephine to look after, he made a will, leaving
everything to her, and signing himself John Keith. This will he carried
in an envelope pinned inside his shirt. As Derwent Conniston he
collected one thousand two hundred and sixty dollars for three and a
half years back wage in the Service. Two hundred and sixty of this he
kept in his own pocket. The remaining thousand he counted out in new
hundred-dollar bills under Mary Josephine's eyes, sealed the bills in
another envelope, and gave the envelope to her.
"It's safer with you than with me," he excused himself. "Fasten it
inside your dress. It's our grub-stake into the mountains."
Mary Josephine accepted the treasure with the repressed delight of one
upon whose fair shoulders had been placed a tremendous responsibility.
There were days of both joy and pain for Keith. For even in the fullest
hours of his happiness there was a thing eating at his heart, a thing
that was eating deeper and deeper until at times it was like a
destroying flame within him. One night he dreamed; he dreamed that
Conniston came to his bedside and wakened him, and that after wakening
him he taunted him in ghoulish glee and told him that in bequeathing
him a sister he had given unto him forever and forever the curse of the
daughters of Achelous. And Keith, waking in the dark hour of night,
knew in his despair that it was so. For all time, even though he won
this fight he was fighting, Mary Josephine would be the unattainable. A
sister--and he loved her with the love of a man!
It was the next day after the dream that they wandered again into the
grove that sheltered Keith's old home, and again they entered it and
went through the cold and empty rooms. In one of these rooms he sought
among the titles of dusty rows of books until he came to one and opened
it. And there he found what had been in the corner of his mind when the
sun rose to give him courage after the night of his dream. The
daughters of Achelous had lost in the end. Ulysses had tricked them.
Ulysses had won. And in this day and age it was up to him, John Keith,
to win, and win he would!
Always he felt this mastering certainty of the future when alone with
Mary Josephine in the open day. With her at his side, her hand in his,
and his arm about her waist, he told himself that all life was a
lie--that there was no earth, no sun, no song or gladness in all the
world, if that world held no hope for him. It was there. It was beyond
the rim of forest. It was beyond the yellow plains, beyond the farthest
timber of the farthest prairie, beyond the foothills; in the heart of
the mountains was its abiding place. As he had dreamed of those
mountains in boyhood and youth, so now he dreamed his dreams over again
with Mary Josephine. For her he painted his pictures of them, as they
wandered mile after mile up the shore of the Saskatchewan--the little
world they would make all for themselves, how they would live, what
they would do, the mysteries they would seek out, the triumphs they
would achieve, the glory of that world--just for two. And Mary
Josephine planned and dreamed with him.
In a week they lived what might have been encompassed in a year. So it
seemed to Keith, who had known her only so long. With Mary Josephine
the view-point was different. There had been a long separation, a
separation filled with a heartbreak which she would never forget, but
it had not served to weaken the bonds between her and this loved one,
who, she thought, had always been her own. To her their comradeship was
more complete now than it ever had been, even back in the old days, for
they were alone in a land that was strange to her, and one was all that
the world held for the other. So her possessorship of Keith was a thing
which--again in the dark and brooding hours of night--sometimes made
him writhe in an agony of shame. Hers was a shameless love, a love
which had not even the lover's reason for embarrassment, a love
unreserved and open as the day. It was her trick, nights, to nestle
herself in the big armchair with him, and it was her fun to smother his
face in her hair and tumble it about him, piling it over his mouth and
nose until she made him plead for air. Again she would fit herself
comfortably in the hollow of his arm and sit the evening out with her
head on his shoulder, while they planned their future, and twice in
that week she fell asleep there. Each morning she greeted him with a
kiss, and each night she came to him to be kissed, and when it was her
pleasure she kissed him--or made him kiss her--when they were on their
long walks. It was bitter-sweet to Keith, and more frequently came the
hours of crushing desolation for him, those hours in the still, dark
night when his hypocrisy and his crime stood out stark and hideous in
his troubled brain.
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