"Ah, a man can open his lungs here and breathe!" exclaimed Jim, as the two came out after supper and stood before the house, gaz-ing across the open country. He drew a deep breath as though to prove his assertion, exhaling with slow satisfaction again. "It's good to see a clear horizon and to know there's all that water between--between me and where I've been." He turned his face to watch the plover in the sky, then looked towards the distant shore-line where the sea was just visible in the long evening light. "There can't be too much water for me," he added, half to himself. "I guess they can't cross water--not that much water at any rate."Tom stared, wondering uneasily what to make of it.
4
"At the trees again, Jim?" he said laughingly. He had overheard the last words, though spoken low, and thought it best not to ignore them altogether. To be natural was the right way, he believed, natural and cheery. To make a joke of anything unpleasant, he felt, was to make it less serious. "I've never seen a tree come across the Atlantic yet, except as a mast--dead," he added.
"I wasn't thinking of the trees just then," was the blunt reply, "but of--something else. The damned trees are nothing, though I hate the sight of 'em. Not of much account, anyway"--as though he compared them mentally with another thing. He puffed at his pipe,
a moment.
"They certainly can't move," put in his brother, "nor swim either."
"Nor another thing," said Jim, his voice thick suddenly, but not with smoke, and his speech confused, though[9] the idea in his mind was certainly clear as daylight. "Things can't hide behind 'em--can they?"
"Not much cover hereabouts, I admit," laughed Tom, though the look in his brother's eyes made his laughter as short as it sounded unnatural.
"That's so," agreed the other. "But what I meant was"--he threw out his chest, looked about him with an air of intense relief, drew in another deep breath, and again exhaled with satisfaction--"if there are no trees, there's no hiding."
It was the expression on the rugged, weathered face that sent the blood in a sudden gulping rush from his brother's heart. He had seen men frightened, seen men afraid before they were actually frightened; he had also seen men stiff with terror in the face both
of natural and so-called supernatural things; but never in his life before had he seen the look of unearthly dread that now turned his
brother's face as white as chalk and yet put the glow of fire in two haunted burning eyes.
Across the darkening landscape the sound of distant barking had floated to them on the evening wind.
"It's only a farm-dog barking." Yet it was Jim's deep, quiet voice that said it, one hand upon his brother's arm.
"That's all," replied Tom, ashamed that he had betrayed himself, and realizing with a shock of surprise that it was Jim who now played the role of comforter--a startling change in their relations. "Why, what did you think it was?"
He tried hard to speak naturally and easily, but his voice shook. So deep was the brothers' love and intimacy that they could not help but share.
Jim lowered his great head. "I thought," he whispered, his grey beard touching the other's cheek, "maybe it was the wolves"--an
agony of terror made both voice and body tremble--"the Wolves of God!"[10]
2
The interval of thirty years had been bridged easily enough; it was the secret that left the open gap neither of them cared or dared to cross. Jim's reason for hesitation lay within reach of guesswork, but Tom's silence was more complicated.
With strong, simple men, strangers to affectation or pretence, reserve is a real, almost a sacred thing. Jim offered nothing more; Tom asked no single question. In the latter's mind lay, for one thing, a singular intuitive certainty: that if he knew the truth he would lose his brother. How, why, wherefore, he had no notion; whether by death, or because, having told an awful thing, Jim would hide-- physically or mentally--he knew not, nor even asked himself. No subtlety lay in Tom, the Orkney farmer. He merely felt that a knowledge of the truth involved separation which was death.
Day and night, however, that extraordinary phrase which, at its first hearing, had frozen his blood, ran on beating in his mind. With
it came always the original, nameless horror that had held him motionless where he stood, his brother's bearded lips against his
ear: The Wolves of God. In some dim way, he sometimes felt--tried to persuade himself, rather--the horror did not belong to the phrase alone, but was a sympathetic echo of what Jim felt himself. It had entered his own mind and heart. They had always shared in this same strange, intimate way. The deep brotherly tie accounted for it. Of the possible transference of thought and emotion he knew nothing, but this was what he meant perhaps.
At the same time he fought and strove to keep it out, not because it brought uneasy and distressing feelings to him, but because he did not wish to pry, to ascertain, to discover his brother's secret as by some kind of subterfuge that seemed too near to eavesdropping almost. Also, he wished most earnestly to protect him. Meanwhile, in[11] spite of himself, or perhaps because of himself, he
5
watched his brother as a wild animal watches its young. Jim was the only tie he had on earth. He loved him with a brother's love, and
Jim, similarly, he knew, loved him. His job was difficult. Love alone could guide him.
He gave openings, but he never questioned:
"Your letter did surprise me, Jim. I was never so delighted in my life. You had still two years to run."
"I'd had enough," was the short reply. "God, man, it was good to get home again!"
This, and the blunt talk that followed their first meeting, was all Tom had to go upon, while those eyes that refused to shut watched ceaselessly always. There was improvement, unless, which never occurred to Tom, it was self-control; there was no more talk of trees and water, the barking of the dogs passed unnoticed, no reference to the loneliness of the backwoods life passed his lips; he spent
his days fishing, shooting, helping with the work of the farm, his evenings smoking over a glass--he was more than temperate--and
talking over the days of long ago.
The signs of uneasiness still were there, but they were negative, far more suggestive, therefore, than if open and direct. He desired no company, for instance--an unnatural thing, thought Tom, after so many years of loneliness.
It was this and the awkward fact that he had given up two years before his time was finished, renouncing, therefore, a comfortable
pension--it was these two big details that stuck with such unkind persistence in his brother's thoughts. Behind both, moreover,
ran ever the strange whispered phrase. What the words meant, or whence they were derived, Tom had no possible inkling. Like the wicked refrain of some forbidden song, they haunted him day and night, even his sleep not free from them entirely. All of which, to the simple Orkney farmer, was so new an experience that he knew not how to deal[12] with it at all. Too strong to be flustered, he was at any rate bewildered. And it was for Jim, his brother, he suffered most.
What perplexed him chiefly, however, was the attitude his brother showed towards old John Rossiter. He could almost have imagined that the two men had met and known each other out in
