Brent looked at him intently for a long second. During the past year he, like others, had wondered at his friend's long absence. At first he had put it down to natural need of vacation and the other's failure to communicate with his friends had seemed significant of no more than the mild eccentricity which had always flavoured his actions. Only later the thought had come to him that Harry's absence might be due to an affair of the heart. This to him had pointed unerringly to Echo Allen, and conviction had leaped to a certainty on the day when he had seen her reception of Jubilee Jim's news of Harry's whereabouts. Had it been a lovers' quarrel? he had wondered. If so, and she had sent him away, she had repented of it, that was manifest. The news of Harry's whereabouts, in his mind, had dovetailed with his knowledge of the political situation and its need of leadership, and the second day thereafter had found him on horseback, following the difficult trail to Harry's mountain eyrie. He had come to grips now with his errand. He sat suddenly upright.

"Sevier," he said, "you've got to do it. You are the only one who can.

You've got to speak at that convention on the seventeenth and nail that plank into the platform hard and fast!"

Harry made a quick gesture, then left the fireplace and began to stride up and down the room. During that silent, insistent gaze it had come to him with a strange glow of excitement what Brent intended to say.

His heart was beating quickly, and a host of conflicting emotions were rioting in his mind. The allusion to his speech of a year ago had brought a throb of the old ecstasy of power--that power which he knew was his now, and in greater degree. If he only might use it for this good purpose!

Brent, looking at him, uncrossed his long legs with a smile. "I agree," he said, "that we may not be able to win this time, but it will start it off right, and it will be a good fight. I'll bet you what you like that within a week--if that plank is rightly hammered in--the Good-Government Clubs all over the State will be wiring allegiance!"

He got up, his lank, nervous figure braced with interest.

"And what if we do lose this Governorship? It will be the first real nail in John Barleycorn's coffin in this State!"

Sevier had sat down on the blanketed couch. His gaze went past the eager face before him and lingered on the sweet, warm world outside, with all its suggestions of new growth and virile strength. But what he really saw was very far away. Was he a poor coward then, to shrink from a woman's smile, a woman's eyes? He put his face in his hands.

Possibilities were beckoning to him, dead things springing up alive, old longings, ambitions, appetences plucking at him.

For a time Brent did not speak. He had turned away and stood in the sunny doorway, looking down the trail. At length he faced about.

"Sevier," he said quickly. "What do you say? Will you do it?"

Harry looked up. The colour had faded from his face, but it was alight with a new energy and resolution. The call had found him, and at that moment the harrowing dread--the problem itself, which had shown so imminent--seemed to have grown dim, to have drawn into the far distance.

"Yes," he answered slowly, "yes, Brent. I will come."

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

THE CHALLENGE

Looking back upon that day, Sevier was often to wonder whether indeed he had missed Fate's purpose, and blinded by a personal ambition, had set its plan at naught. For that instant's decision was to prove the key to a series of fateful doings which bore him on, irresistibly, into a line of action from which, deliberately, he must have shrunk.

But having set his hand, it was characteristic of him that he did not falter. It had required resolution to put Echo and his relations with her into the background, but he accomplished even this, and he allowed no thought of possible complications to affect his mental serenity.

His face was composed and determined as he descended from the train, at dusk of the sixteenth, at the familiar city station, to find--as Brent had arranged--his motor waiting for him, with Bob, his chauffeur, wearing a broad grin of welcome, at its door. So pleasantly habitual it all seemed, so sharply remembered was each sight and sound as the car sped through the glimmering traffic, that almost he could have believed the past year, full as it had been of pain, a vacuous dream and that no hideous hiatus had lain between the then and now.

He was sensible for the first time of the intense mental strain he had been labouring under since his sluggish prison routine had opened into this dubious freedom--the tension of his struggle, the instinct of impending catastrophe, and the ghastly doubt of himself where Echo was concerned. The la.s.situde and inaction of the Bungalow had added to this strain. The relief now of movement and action brought surcease, and a feeling of present confidence, if not of definite security.

Before he reached his apartment, he was sufficiently himself to give the welcome he received from Aunt Judy and from Suzuki a feeling of usualness. Brent, with two or three others who saw eye to eye with him, so far as the exigencies of the political situation were concerned, spent a part of the later evening with him and the talk furnished the final tonic--if any had been needed--to brace him for the task that awaited. That night, for the first time in many months, he slept the deep, fortifying sleep of utter and dreamless unconsciousness.

With the morning he felt no misgiving or shadow of self-doubt. His mind temporarily was clear and untroubled, all of the vexing problem was pushed, by the singleness of his purpose, into the unknown future.

By his express wish, his arrival had not been published, and, except for a few of its leaders with whom Brent had conferred, the circles of the convention, then in session in the biggest auditorium the city boasted, were no more aware than were the hosts of his friends, of his coming. He spent the morning alone in his room, sitting movelessly hour after hour, marshalling his ideas, a.s.sembling his forces, stirred as he had never before been stirred by the quick suggestion of a living issue and an unrivalled opportunity.

He lunched quietly alone with Brent in a private room at the club, and immediately afterward drove with him to the hall. Throughout the morning the platform had been under discussion; the debate was now about finished. It was the psychological moment for his effort.

As Harry stood silent before the sea of faces, in the instant that followed his recognition and introduction, he was conscious of a tense and vital concentration that swept from him the last vestige of self-consciousness. With his first measured words, too, the outline which he had pondered during the morning vanished utterly from his brain. He remembered nothing save the one thing he had come to do, saw with his mind's eye only the monstrous evil against which he stood.

Words came to him in a flood--words magically compelling, that burned and quivered in their intense appeal. For an hour he held the interest of the great a.s.sembly as no orator had done, sketching with hard and pitiless directness the ramifications of the grim traffic that blasted whatsoever it touched, that knew no social bar, before which the magnate's mansion and the labourer's tenement were as one, against which no bolt or chain--save it be one wrought by the law of a Sovereign Commonwealth--might avail.

In his words was no tang of the study, none of the didactic methods of the arm-chair student, no array of statistics. What he expressed had been seared upon his soul, in inextinguishable letters and as he spoke shooting pictures etched themselves as if on some quivering panorama in his brain: he saw the black bottle in the wall-cabinet of his inner office--the hidden sanctuary where he had signed away his talent and linked his years to the demon of remorse: he saw the representative of the great Corporation, whose power flowed from that traffic, holding in his merciless hand the happiness of a woman that had been dearer than his own life: he saw the cringing hatred in the eyes of Paddy the Brick, the furtive drink-lined faces of the jail corridors. And in his pa.s.sionate denunciation, he called upon those who heard him to do their part to rid the state of its Master and to set it free. Lastly, in a peroration which carried all before it, he pictured a community from which the unendurable stain had been forever wiped away, the pitfalls of its youth filled up, the shame of its prisons lightened--a community ruled no longer by King Alcohol, but by the Genius of the Home, to which freedom no longer stood for ribald license and self-harm, but for the Common Good.

He stopped amid a dense silence--the truest tribute to real oratory--then with a great burst, the storm of approval came.

It filled the hall with electric feeling, surging in waves that overtopped all decorum and made the hour significant and momentous.

Near him Harry saw the party leaders, among them Judge Allen, newly-elected President of the Civic Club; they showed a singular self-a.s.surance overlaid by vivid excitement. In the galleries were banks of feminine faces, tier on tier, merged in a tumultuous hand-clapping like silver rain. Below, the house was on its feet, a sea of waving flags and handkerchiefs.

The tumult swelled, then died away to pulsing band-music and in the subsidence, Brent leaned over Harry's shoulder to give him the quick pressure of a hand--words could not have said so much.

It was not until the convention had adjourned for an hour's recess that Harry could escape from the congratulations that poured upon him where he sat. While he spoke, the sense of mastery and domination had possessed him; now he was feeling the inevitable revulsion, and with it came the fading of his confidence and the relifting of the old sickening question.

It had surged back before the applause had died away, the moment he had released his mind from the clamping resolution of his purpose, springing upon him like a cunning enemy who had dogged him in the shadow. His roseate speculations of the Bungalow seemed now but hollow wraiths that had mocked him with an unrealisable promise. Could he ever for a moment have cheated himself into forgetfulness of the _impa.s.se_ that lay there?

With Brent beside him, he pushed his way to the foyer. There the press was thickened and they were blocked in a corner by the stream of people pouring from the galleries, from which position Harry found himself nodding across to enthusiastic greetings of old acquaintances.

"Good heavens!" fumed Brent, impatiently. "We'll never get out at this rate. Let's try the other door." Harry turned with him, seeking a way through the diminishing crowd. Then, abruptly he stopped. Near at hand, her side-face turned toward him, was Echo. Her delicate colour was heightened by an unwonted flush and her eyes shone softly under the curling golden waves of her hair.

Gazing in a confusion that was almost panic, Harry felt, with a burning sense of helplessness and cowardice, the impossibility of his position.

The sight of her was like a cooling stream to a famished wanderer in the desert. It called to him with a thousand voices, lifting before him every sweet reminder of vanished things. She had not yet seen him, and as the crowd swept her slowly closer, he felt to the full his own blindness and egregious self-a.s.surance that had made this plunge into the old current seem possible. He watched her with a fascinated intensity. She was speaking to some one beside her, her glance wandering. It shifted, then was raised, as if by very attraction, to his face.

He saw recognition spring across it like a shaft of sunlight, as with a quick impulse she started forward--then her arm caught itself, as it were, half extended. He felt himself chill in every nerve, the air was breathless. Mechanically his hand touched hers.

"You have been gone a year," she said, in a low, uneven voice.

Harry's very thought seemed suspended. "Is it--so long?" he answered.

He scarcely knew what he said: the reply was a mere involuntary expression of habit, a conventional phrase to fill the moment's need.

He could not know that the very repression with which he was holding himself against the quick thrill of her touch made the words lifeless and inconsequential.

To Echo, however, in the tremulous gladness that had filled her at the knowledge of his return, and the exaltation of the hour, the reply, deserved as at heart she felt it to be, was like a blow in the face. A startled paleness swept up her cheeks like a wave, blotting their hue and misting the clear April of her eyes. She turned half-away, toward her companion, and the next moment the eddying crowd had come between.

On the hurrying pavement Brent dropped his hand on Sevier's shoulder.

"I'm not going to congratulate you," he said. "I'm going to congratulate the new party. I'm off to the sanctum to write my editorial while it's red hot. You'll come back for the other session, I suppose. They're liable to nominate to-night."

"No," replied Harry. "I must get away from the crowd somewhere."

Brent caught the la.s.situde of his tone. "Better walk yourself tired,"

he counselled, "and then turn in. You'll be all right to-morrow."

They clasped hands and parted.

For a time Sevier walked aimlessly, choosing the less frequented thoroughfares, alone at last to think. He had done his best. Whether or not it would accomplish what Brent had hoped, he had made the strongest effort of which he was capable. The meeting with Echo had shaken him by its very unexpectedness, and had shown him how bitterly hard was to be his struggle with himself. In that instant of their encounter he had realised his own weakness.

Through the long, fading afternoon he walked on and on, past the outskirts of the city, on into the peaceful willow-green quiet of the country, where paved streets gave place to meandering red roads and the air was sweet with the delicate fragrance of blossoming fruit-trees.

He sat an hour on the violet-blurred gra.s.s above the silver-looping river where he had often fished as a boy. All his life he had loved that gold-tinted, dream-shadowed valley. But now the soft wild clamour of birds, the multifold perfume of the fields, the errant plum-petals swimming in the breeze, the long-armed trees reaching out over the darkling water, called to him in vain. He scarcely saw the far, blue, hill-brushed horizon unfurl its pageant cloud-cl.u.s.ters to hide the sun, where it hastened, in purple toga, to greet the soft-eyed night.

What Spartan career had he been planning for himself? He loved her, desired her, still. He realised it with a stab of self-contempt. And loving her, could he see her day by day, meet her, talk with her--cold and empty words meaning less than nothing--with his heart crying to hers: "Thus far but no further! Because I loved you once I wear a shameful brand on my forehead, but my arms may never enfold you, your lips never lie on my lips, your heart beat against mine!--Never, never, never!"--could flesh and blood be capable of this? Better to go, while there was yet time, somewhere, anywhere, so it be out of her world.

Under the deep evening sky, a gulf of gold, he turned city-ward again, still painfully absorbed with his thoughts--a dark tangle of anguish and doubt and longing.