Chapter 6

THE STONE THREAT.

When Claire awoke she stared around her for a few minutes before the events of their frantic struggle came back to her. Her eyes strayed to the figure before the fireplace. Idly she noted the lustrous, wavy black hair and deep brown eyes protected by unusually heavy lashes. It was clearly the face of a thinker, a dreamer, yet there was something sensual about the mouth, potentially voluptuous, abandoned, and suggestive of tremendous passion that slumbered close beneath the brain that was so actively awake. Claire ached, and her body tingled with the unaccustomed warmth. She lay quiet, looking at the fire, her mind still uncertain in its action, weaving sharp, dynamic images about this new personality. While his appearance gripped and awed her strangely, at the same time she felt drawn to him. She turned and threw out her hand. Her host closed his book and looked up, smiling.

"Ah, _la señora se siente mejor_?" His deep, rich voice, although lighter than Lawrence's, was full of music, but she did not understand his words. Her blank expression told him, and he smiled again.

"I remember, you spoke English," he said with only the slightest accent. "Are you better, _madame_?"

She answered his warm smile and said weakly: "Much better, thank you!"

"And your husband?" Claire saw that he was looking beyond her, and she turned to find Lawrence at her side. Instinctively she resented his being there. The warm blood rushed to her face.

"He--oh--he will be all right, I trust!" she stammered falteringly, and her host looked puzzled. Her impulse was to tell him that Lawrence was not her husband, but she thought better of it and said nothing about the relationship.

"He had a long, desperate struggle to bring me here," she said instead. "You see, I broke my ankle and he had to carry me."

"Oh!" The man rose, his face filled with respect as he looked at Lawrence asleep beside her.

"From where did he carry you?" he asked.

"From the coast," she shuddered. "It has been terrible!"

His face expressed utter amazement as he repeated: "From the coast? It is a miracle!"

She made no reply, for Lawrence stirred and tried to sit up.

"You'd better lie still," the stranger said kindly. "You deserve rest, my friend." Then, as to himself, he added: "It is the first miracle in which I can believe."

Claire stared at him, and he laughed softly. "Pardon, _madame_! I am an unhappy seeker after truth," he apologized, throwing a log on the fire.

For Lawrence and Claire the days that followed were uneventful days of recovery from their hardship. Slowly both of them grew stronger and resumed their normal habits of thought and speech. Their host was a gentle nurse, kindly and considerate. Claire assumed her wonted attitude of the cultured woman, a guest in the house of a friend, and the Spaniard met her with the polished courtesy of a cosmopolitan. Lawrence, too, became the usual man that he was, careless of little niceties, indifferent to form, but a charming companion and a delightful guest.

From the first he and Philip became intensely interested in each other. They discovered early that each was a thinker and a searcher in his own way for the one great solution of life.

During the first half-hour Claire had demanded of their rescuer where they were and how soon they could get back to civilization. Philip had laughed gently.

"You are on the borders of Bolivia," he told her, "and the nearest railroad is two hundred miles away. It is impossible to get out until spring. Long ere this snow will have barred the way through the one pass that leads out and we are prisoners--the three of us. You will have to accept the hospitality of Philip Ortez until the spring."

Lawrence had accepted the verdict with calm indifference.

"Oh, well," he said, "it's hard on you, but as far as I'm concerned, one place is as good as another."

"I shall enjoy your company," their host laughed.

After voicing polite thanks, Claire, in her own thought, had rebelled against the situation vehemently. She wanted to get home, she wanted to get away from everything that suggested her last weeks of suffering, she wanted to get away from these men. Her heart leaped to the ever-recurring dream of the husband, whose arms should take her up and hold her warmly against the memory of their separation.

"Then there is no way out?" she asked again.

"None, _madame_," and Philip Ortez bowed. "You will have to be the guest of a humble mountaineer."

"I shall enjoy it, I am sure," she answered. "It is simply a woman's natural desire for home which leads me to ask again."

His eyes clouded. Claire somehow found herself fancying a tragic mystery in the life of this man, and then rebuked herself for romancing. Certainly, such fancies were not her habit, and she wondered why they were occurring to her.

The cabin stood on the very edge of the forest through which Lawrence had carried Claire the last morning of their long march. Protected by its pines, the little house fronted on a small lake, a place where the river which they had followed widened to a half-mile, and stayed thus with scarcely any current save directly through the center. All around the lake the forest stretched its massed green, and here Philip trapped. The lake, in its turn, provided him with fish.

The week after their arrival snow had heaped itself into the ravine and piled up high around the cabin. Ice was beginning to form on the edge of the lake, and their host was preparing for his winter's work. They were too weak to go with him, and he left them in possession of the cabin.

At first there had been an unaccountable awkwardness between Lawrence and Claire, and it had left a reserve which was difficult to overcome. Lawrence had explained their situation to Philip; the Spaniard had been apologetically gracious, but there was something in Claire's nature that made her wish that Lawrence had never been thought of as her husband. Dressed in Philip's clothes, and in the presence of a roof and fire, she felt a desire to be free from the memory of the days when she had clung about Lawrence's neck, and, above all, she felt that she was not able to meet him with understanding. His blindness in these surroundings seemed to set a sudden and impassable barrier between them, and made her ill at ease when she was alone with him.

Lawrence was irritated that she should so immediately react into what he called the old conventional habit toward blind people, and keep it standing like a stupid but solid wall between all their talk. Now that she was no longer dependent on him, she appeared to him more attractive. He thought of her husband, and wondered if Claire's attitude toward himself was tempered with the thought of the man at home. "Surely," he told himself, "she can't be allowing that to come between us, for it is so obviously quite unnecessary." Then he began to wonder how much of her life was centered about her husband. What sort of man was he, and did she love him devotedly? As he thought, there crept into his feeling a sense of irritation against the unknown man who was obstructing his friendship with the woman he had carried half through the Andes Mountains.

Then the longing for his work came over him, and there were times when he felt he must do something. He spoke needlessly sharp words to Claire. Though she concealed her anger, there grew between them a continuous straining born out of mutual misunderstanding and a great submerged tangle of emotions.

One morning when Ortez in snow-shoes and fur had gone for the day to look after his traps, Claire washed up the tin dishes they used, and sat down before the fire opposite Lawrence. His head was in his hands and his face was somber.

"You look sad this morning," she said casually.

"Do I?" he answered. "I'm not--especially. I was just planning a piece of work, dreaming it out in outline."

She looked at him thoughtfully. His forehead was high and broad, she thought, and his hands-- Their days in the wilderness rushed back over her. She was angry at the memories they brought her, and doubly angry at Lawrence, as if he only were responsible.

"It's inconceivable," she said calmly, "that you, without seeing, can really carve anything true to form and line." In her voice was incredulity and unbelief.

He rose suddenly, his face white, and said, with an intensity that startled her: "That sentiment is as familiar to me as my name. I have heard it from sight-bigoted people from the days when I made my first attempt to go back to my school work. I am rather weary of it."

She sat staring at him for a moment, then she laughed. She could not have told why she did it, and she was instantly sorry. The blood rushed to his face.

"I shall create that which will forever assure you that I can carve true to the most familiar form and line you know," he said fiercely.

Her face was as crimson as his now, though she felt ice cold.

"What do you mean?" she demanded, her voice unsteady.

He laughed bitterly. In his own heart a fierce volcanic surge was raging which he did not attempt to control.

"Do you think that I, trained as I am to gather fact from touch, could carry you through weeks of hell in my arms, against my breast, and not know you, you as you are, Claire Barkley? I shall carve you, you with your cold reserve suppressing the emotional chaos within you, and you will not fail to recognize yourself."

Claire gripped the chair arms. Anger, fear, doubt, then the knowledge that he could do as he said, swept over her in rapidly succeeding waves, and gathered at last into a steel hate that she felt must last through eternity.

"You, you would do that, after I guided you here! You would take advantage of what I could not help, and--and--" she choked, and then said swiftly--"so, under your indifferent exterior you used your touch that way these days! Oh, you--you beast!"

Lawrence laughed coolly. "I could no more help it than I can avoid being here."

"Lies!" she exclaimed. "A gentleman could help it!"

"Perhaps, but not an artist."

"And what of beauty, of your boasted purity of art, is there in that?"

"All," he said calmly. "If you knew, oh, if I could make you see what every artist knows"--he was talking passionately now, his face illumined in spite of his blind eyes--"you would realize, that I could not help it, that I glory in it, and that it was and is the way of art."

He rose and walked the floor, pouring out his creed in a stream of burning words. "I am a machine, a sensitive thing that registers what it feels and knows, that is all. You touch me, my brain registers that touch, and something in me, the will to live, the desire to create, the insistent shout for expression says, 'Take that and carve it in stone.' If I could see, if I were not blind, I would have been a painter. I would have painted you, almost naked as you were, your eyes filled with the hunger for life, your face tense with racing thoughts, I would have painted you fully, all of you, as you were in night-gown and skirt there in that forest, and you would have shouted to all the world from my canvas, 'Look at me, I am the primitive, the wild, the passionate, the tender, the selfish and unselfish living woman. See me as I am, cultured, refined, educated, elemental withal, and the emblem of humanity as it is, still stained with the traditional mud of superstition and blood that marks its origin. Oh, I would have painted you so, and now I shall carve you so!"

He stopped, and Claire looked at him wildly, her eyes aflame with hate and admiration.

"You would use another human being that way?" she gasped.

"I would use any one, I would, I will, at any cost to them, to me, if the outcome be a piece of art, a work that in its truth, its immortal beauty, shall stand a lasting testimony that I, Lawrence Gordon, have mastered blindness and registered life correctly."

A great light swept over her mind; that was the key to him. He would sacrifice himself to conquer blindness--but would he, she wondered, and instantly her thought found expression.

"Would you crush yourself to create that mastery of blindness?"

He laughed. "I have, I am doing it," he said. "I would go through all the torment of the world if I might create something lasting, true, and beautiful."

Claire leaned forward, her lips apart, her eyes bright. That she hated this man she was sure, yet all her woman's soul was awed by what she now saw behind his mask of blindness. Then a new thought came to her.

"Might it not be," she asked subtly, "if you hold suffering to be the key to beauty that you would profit more at last by denying the impulse to create the thing you are planning?"

He laughed again. "I hold that pain is only the spur to progress. I care nothing for the sentimentalism you are talking now. I carried you through the wilderness, I suffered and bore it, I staggered through nights and days with your warm body against mine that I might live, and now--now I know the value of life, I understand as never before the pain our fathers paid. I know the bitter animal war against environment, evolution whipped into action by pain, hunger, fear of death, and I shall carve that, all that, into the statue of one woman."

"And what of me, me and you as such, Claire and Lawrence, who were there through that struggle in the wilderness?" The speech leaped from somewhere in her being before she knew it, and with it came knowledge that stung her into tearful self-hate.

"We shall go back to our old lives, I suppose, and live them out."

It was what she had expected him to say, yet the calm matter-of-fact statement hurt her as nothing he had ever said before.

Lawrence dropped into the arm-chair again, and rested his head on his hand. He was calmer now, and, reviewing in his mind what he had said, he was beginning to ask himself why had he given way to this sudden resentment against Claire. If she doubted him because he was blind, was that any more than others had done? He had never burst out against them. What was the matter with him? He surveyed the whole trend of his life up to this minute: how he had broken at late adolescence from a glowing idealist to a wanderer through varying paths of thought; always stirred, stimulated, and swept on by contact with other people, books he had read, women for whom he had occasional fancies of love, until gradually he settled into his assured manner. It was exercise he needed, that and work.

He asked himself if he seriously loved Claire, and answered unequivocally that he did not. He wanted her friendship very much, indeed, but love, not at all. If she had been single, perhaps--but no, he did not care about her that way, that was all. He had been too long shut up here in the cabin with her and without work. He must get some wood and amuse himself carving things with Ortez's knife; it would be good practise, and, at the same time, relieve his nerves. He was sorry he had let himself go; Claire must not be hurt.

"Claire," he said quietly, "if I wounded you, if I said things I ought not, pardon me! I am getting nervous doing nothing, and I am not myself these days."

She laughed calmly. "Oh, very well!" she said. "I wonder that we don't come to blows, cooped up here as we are. I think next time Philip makes his rounds I'll go with him."

"It would be a good thing," answered Lawrence. "I'd like it myself."

Claire did not keep up the talk. She, too, was thinking fast, and facing new problems that demanded her attention. She was surprised to find that her resentment toward Lawrence was completely gone. What would her husband think of him? What would he do when she returned, when she told him of her journey with this blind man through weeks and weeks of wilderness when they were almost naked. She stopped, that was what Lawrence had said, 'almost naked.' Her flesh tingled as she saw the picture which he said he would like to paint of her.

What would she, Claire Barkley, do if such a picture were painted? She buried her face deep in her hands, but in her heart she knew that she would respect the man who painted it. And if Lawrence carved her so in stone, and did it as he thought he could--she pondered over that for some time.

"I think," she said aloud, and Lawrence raised his head, "that if I were to stay shut up here alone as Philip does, I should go crazy before spring."

"It all depends on how your mind is occupied," he laughed.

She blushed guiltily, and was glad he could not see her face.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK. Don't forget this magazine is issued weekly, and that you will get the continuation of this story without waiting a month.

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Claire

by Leslie Burton Blades

THE BLIND LOVE OF A BLIND HERO

_BY A BLIND AUTHOR_

This story began in the All-Story Weekly for October 5.