Hidden Creek.

by Katharine Newlin Burt.

PART ONE

THE GOOD OLD WORLD

CHAPTER I

SHEILA'S LEGACY

Just before his death, Marcus Arundel, artist and father of Sheila, bore witness to his faith in G.o.d and man. He had been lying apparently unconscious, his slow, difficult breath drawn at longer and longer intervals. Sheila was huddled on the floor beside his bed, her hand pressing his urgently in the pitiful attempt, common to human love, to hold back the resolute soul from the next step in its adventure. The nurse, who came in by the day, had left a paper of instructions on the table. Here a candle burned under a yellow shade, throwing a circle of warm, unsteady light on the head of the girl, on the two hands, on the rumpled coverlet, on the dying face. This circle of light seemed to collect these things, to choose them, as though for the expression of some meaning. It felt for them as an artist feels for his composition and gave to them a symbolic value. The two hands were in the center of the glow--the long, pale, slack one, the small, desperate, clinging one. The conscious and the unconscious, life and death, humanity and G.o.d--all that is mysterious and tragic seemed to find expression there in the two hands.

So they had been for six hours, and it would soon be morning. The large, bare room, however, was still possessed by night, and the city outside was at its lowest ebb of life, almost soundless. Against the skylight the winter stars seemed to be pressing; the sky was laid across the panes of gla.s.s like a purple cloth in which sparks burned.

Suddenly and with strength Arundel sat up. Sheila rose with him, drawing up his hand in hers to her heart.

"Keep looking at the stars, Sheila," he said with thrilling emphasis, and widened his eyes at the visible host of them. Then he looked down at her; his eyes shone as though they had caught a reflection from the myriad lights. "It is a good old world," he said heartily in a warm and human voice, and he smiled his smile of everyday good-fellowship.

Sheila thanked G.o.d for his return, and on the very instant he was gone.

He dropped back, and there were no more difficult breaths.

Sheila, alone there in the garret studio above the city, cried to her father and shook him, till, in very terror of her own frenzy in the face of his stillness, she grew calm and laid herself down beside him, put his dead arm around her, nestled her head against his shoulder. She was seventeen years old, left alone and penniless in the old world that he had just p.r.o.nounced so good. She lay there staring at the stars till they faded, and the cold, clear eye of day looked down into the room.

CHAPTER II

SYLVESTER HUDSON COMES FOR HIS PICTURE

Back of his sallow, lantern-jawed face, Sylvester Hudson hid successfully, though without intention, all that was in him whether of good or ill. Certainly he did not look his history. He was stoop-shouldered, pensive-eyed, with long hands on which he was always turning and twisting a big emerald. He dressed quietly, almost correctly, but there was always something a little wrong in the color or pattern of his tie, and he was too fond of brown and green mixtures which did not become his sallowness. He smiled very rarely, and when he did smile, his long upper lip unfastened itself with an effort and showed a horizontal wrinkle halfway between the pointed end of his nose and the irregular, nicked row of his teeth.

Altogether, he was a gentle, bilious-looking sort of man, who might have been anything from a country gentleman to a moderately prosperous clerk.

As a matter of fact, he was the owner of a dozen small, not too respectable, hotels through the West, and had an income of nearly half a million dollars. He lived in Millings, a town in a certain Far-Western State, where flourished the most pretentious and respectable of his hotels. It had a famous bar, to which rode the sheep-herders, the cowboys, the ranchers, the dry-farmers of the surrounding country--yes, and sometimes, thirstiest of all, the workmen from more distant oil-fields, a dangerous crew. Millings at that time had not yielded to the generally increasing "dryness" of the West. It was "wet,"

notwithstanding its choking alkali dust; and the deep pool of its wetness lay in Hudson's bar, The Aura. It was named for a woman who had become his wife.

When Hudson came to New York he looked up his Eastern patrons, and it was one of these who, knowing Arundel's need, encouraged the hotel-keeper in his desire to secure a "jim-dandy picture" for the lobby of The Aura and took him for the purpose to Marcus's studio. On that morning, hardly a fortnight before the artist's death, Sheila was not at home.

Marcus, in spite of himself, was managed into a sale. It was of an enormous canvas, covered weakly enough by a thin reproduction of a range of the Rockies and a sagebrush flat. Mr. Hudson in his hollow voice p.r.o.nounced it "cla.s.sy." "Say," he said, "put a little life into the foreground and that would please _me_. It's what I'm seekin'. Put in an automobile meetin' one of these old-time prairie schooners--the old West sayin' howdy to the noo. That will tickle the trade." Mark, who was feeling weak and ill, consented wearily. He sketched in the proposed amendment and Hudson approved with one of his wrinkled smiles. He offered a small price, at which Arundel leapt like a famished hound.

When his visitors had gone, the painter went feverishly to work. The day before his death, Sheila, under his whispered directions, put the last touches to the body of the "auto_m_obile."

"It's ghastly," sighed the sick man, "but it will do--for Millings." He turned his back sadly enough to the canvas, which stood for him like a monument to fallen hope. Sheila praised it with a faltering voice, but he did not turn nor speak. So she carried the huge picture out of his sight.

The next day, at about eleven o'clock in the morning, Hudson called. He came with stiff, angular motions of his long, thin legs, up the four steep, shabby flights and stopped at the top to get his breath.

"The picture ain't worth the climb," he thought; and then, struck by the peculiar stillness of the garret floor, he frowned. "d.a.m.ned if the feller ain't out!" He took a stride forward and knocked at Arundel's door. There was no answer. He turned the k.n.o.b and stepped into the studio.

A screen stood between him and one half of the room. The other half was empty. The place was very cold and still. It was deplorably bare and shabby in the wintry morning light. Some one had eaten a meager breakfast from a tray on the little table near the stove. Hudson's canvas stood against the wall facing him, and its presence gave him a feeling of ownership, of a right to be there. He put his long, stiff hands into his pockets and strolled forward. He came round the corner of the screen and found himself looking at the dead body of his host.

The nurse, that morning, had come and gone. With Sheila's help she had prepared Arundel for his burial. He lay in all the formal detachment of death, his eyelids drawn decently down over his eyes, his lips put carefully together, his hands, below their white cuffs and black sleeves, laid carefully upon the clean smooth sheet.

Hudson drew in a hissing breath, and at the sound Sheila, crumpled up in exhausted slumber on the floor beside the bed, awoke and lifted her face.

It was a heart-shaped face, a thin, white heart, the peak of her hair cutting into the center of her forehead. The mouth struck a note of life with its dull, soft red. There was not lacking in this young face the slight exaggerations necessary to romantic beauty. Sheila had a strange, arresting sort of jaw, a trifle over-accentuated and out of drawing. Her eyes were long, flattened, narrow, the color of bubbles filled with smoke, of a surface brilliance and an inner mistiness--indescribable eyes, clear, very melting, wistful and beautiful under sooty lashes and slender, arched black brows.

Sheila lifted this strange, romantic face on its long, romantic throat and looked at Hudson. Then she got to her feet. She was soft and silken, smooth and tender, gleaming white of skin. She had put on an old black dress, just a sc.r.a.p of a flimsy, little worn-out gown. A certain slim, crushable quality of her body was accentuated by this flimsiness of covering. She looked as though she could be drawn through a ring--as though, between your hands, you could fold her to nothing. A thin little kitten of silky fur and small bones might have the same feel as Sheila.

She stood up now and looked tragically and helplessly at Hudson and tried to speak.

He backed away from the bed, beckoned to her, and met her in the other half of the room so that the leather screen stood between them and the dead man. They spoke in hushed voices.

"I had no notion, Miss Arundel, that--that--of--this," Hudson began in a dry, jerky whisper. "Believe _me_, I wouldn't 'a' thought of intrudin'. I ordered the picture there from your father a fortnight ago, and this was the day I was to come and give it a last looking-over before I came through with the cash, see? I hadn't heard he was sick even, much less"--he cleared his throat--"gone beyond," he ended, quoting from the "Millings Gazette" obituary column. "You get me?"

"Yes," said Sheila, in her voice that in some mysterious way was another expression of the clear mistiness of her eyes and the suppleness of her body. "You are Mr. Hudson." She twisted her hands together behind her back. She was shivering with cold and nervousness. "It's done, you see.

Father finished it."

Hudson gave the canvas an absent glance and motioned Sheila to a chair with a stiff gesture of his arm.

"You set down," he said.

She obeyed, and he walked to and fro before her.

"Say, now," he said, "I'll take the picture all right. But I'd like to know, Miss Arundel, if you'll excuse me, how you're fixed?"

"Fixed?" Sheila faltered.

"Why, yes, ma'am--as to finances, I mean. You've got some funds, or some relations or some friends to call upon--?"

Sheila drew up her head a trifle, lowered her eyes, and began to plait her thin skirt across her knee with small, delicate fingers. Hudson stopped in his walk to watch this mechanical occupation. She struggled dumbly with her emotion and managed to answer him at last.

"No, Mr. Hudson. Father is very poor. I haven't any relations. We have no friends here nor anywhere near. We lived in Europe till quite lately--a fishing village in Normandy. I--I shall have to get some work."

"Say!" It was an e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of pity, but there was a note of triumph in it, too; perhaps the joy of the gratified philanthropist.

"Now, look-a-here, little girl, the price of that picture will just about cover your expenses, eh?--board and--er--funeral?"

Sheila nodded, her throat working, her lids pressing down tears.

"Well, now, look-a-here. I've got a missus at home."

Sheila looked up and the tears fell. She brushed them from her cheeks.

"A missus?"