The Everlasting Whisper

The man struggling weakly against the pitiless wilderness, wallowing in the snow, seemed to make his way along the gorge inch by inch. He carried something on his back, something white under the falling snow which whitened his hat and labouring shoulders. A sack with something in it, something to which he clung tenaciously. How he floundered and battled against the high-heaped white stuff about him which held him back, which mounted about his legs, up to his waist; at times, when he floundered he was all but lost in it. He lay still like a dead man; he struggled, and began crawling on again. He stopped and looked about him --how her heart pounded then! He was looking for something, seeking something! Her!

She was so certain it must be Brodie. Yet she remained motionless, powerless to move though she remembered King's word of the hiding-place where she would be safe; she peered out, fascinated.

In time the man came closer and the first suspicion entered her mind that, after all, it might not be Brodie. He stopped; he was exhausted; he pulled off his hat and ran his hand across his face. Then, still bareheaded, he looked up. It was Gratton!

Gratton alone; Gratton looking back over his shoulder more often than he quested far ahead; Gratton in a mad attempt to make haste where haste was impossible. Now his every gesture bespoke a frantic haste. He was escaping from something. Then, what? He had left the other men; he was running away from them. She knew it as well as if he had screamed it into her ears. A sudden spurt of pity for him entered her heart; he seemed so beaten and bewildered and frantic and terrified; who, better than she, could sympathize with one in Gratton's predicament? She looked far down the gorge; she could see, like a bluish crooked shadow, the trail which he had made after him. No one else in sight! Then she forgot everything saving that she and Gratton were alone, that they had been friends, that they were bound in a common fate. She leaned as far out as she could; he was just below now; she called to him.

He stopped dead in his tracks; he jerked his head up and stared wildly; his mouth dropped open, and in the shock of the moment speech was denied him. She called again.

"You!" Had not the silence been so complete his gasping voice would have failed to reach her; as it was she barely heard it. "You, Gloria? Here? My God--have I gone mad?"

The man's villainy of so few days ago appeared now, in the biassed light of circumstance, a pardonable, a forgettable offence. He had loved her; he had wanted to marry her; he had, with that in mind, tricked her. He had taken advantage of the universal admission that in love as in war all things were fair. The ugliness of what he had done was chiefly ugly because it had lain against a background of commonplace and convention; here, at the time when no considerations existed save the eternal and vital ones, all of Gratton's futile trickery was as though it had never been. She was calling to him again, urging him to clamber up the cliff, bidding him hurry before he was seen.