The Miracle Man by Frank L. Packard

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"Yes; it is true," he answered, in a low voice.

"Thank God!" she whispered--and hid her face in her hands--and presently
he heard her sob again.

A tiny cloud edged the moon, and the light faded, and it grew dark, and
the darkness hid her; then softly, timidly almost it seemed, the
radiance came creeping through the branches overhead again--and then he
spoke.

"Helena," he said, steadying his voice with an effort, "you spoke of
atonement a little while ago; but there is no atonement that I can make
to you--nothing that I can do to change what I would give my soul to
change. I know what it meant to you to send Thornton away to-night, for
I love you now as you love him--I know why you did it, and--"

She was staring at him a little wildly--her hands pressed against her
cheeks.

"Love--Thornton," she repeated in a sort of wondering way, a long pause
between the words.

"Yes," he said gently; "I know. Have you forgotten what you told me this
afternoon?--that you had learned--last night--what love was."

She shook her head.

"I do not love Thornton," she said in a monotone. "And yet it is true
that through him I learned what love was, what it _could_ be--don't you
understand?"

Understand! No; it seemed that he could never understand! She did not
love Thornton! And then, as some fiery cordial, the words seemed to whip
through his veins, quickening the beat of his heart into wild,
tumultuous throbbing. Yes, yes, he could understand--it was
true--true--she did not love Thornton.

"Helena!" he cried--and stretched out his arms to her. "I thought, oh,
God, I thought that I had lost you--Helena!"

But she did not move.

"What does it matter to you whether I love Thornton or not?" she said
dully. "Does it change anything where you and I are concerned--does it
change what I told you this afternoon--that I would not go back to
_that_."

"To that! Ah, no!"--his voice rang dominant, vibrant, triumphant now.
"Helena, don't you understand? We are to begin life again--in a new
way, the true way, the only way. Don't you see--I love you!"

Still she did not move--but there was a great whiteness in her face, and
in the whiteness a great light.

"You mean?"--her lips scarcely seemed to form the words.

"Yes!" he cried. "Yes; to make a home for you, to marry you if only you
love me still, to live in God's own sight and hold you as a sacred
gift--Helena! Helena!"--his arms went out to her again, and the yearning
in his soul was in his voice--to crush her to him, to hold her in his
arms, and hold her there where none should take her from him, to shield
and guard her through the years to come, to live with her a life that
seemed to break now in a vista of gladness, of glory, as the day-dawn
breaks with its golden rays of God-given promise--the new life, perfect
and pure and innocent--because he loved her. "Helena! Speak to me. Tell
me that it is not too late--tell me that you love me too."

And then her eyes were raised to his, and they were wet--but there was
love-light and a wondrous happiness shining through the tears.

"Helena!" he murmured brokenly--and swept her into his arms--and kissed
the eyelids, lowered now, the hair, the white brow, the lips--kissed
her, and held her there, her clinging arms about his neck, her face half
hidden on his shoulder.

And so for a space they stood there--and there were no words to say,
only the song in their hearts in deathless melody--but after a little
time he held her from him, and lifted up her face that he might look his
fill upon it.

"Helena," he said, "I cannot understand it all yet--it is as though it
were born out of the sin and the darkness and the blackness of what is
gone--as though here at this Shrine that we created in mockery and crime
it was meant that you and I should save each other for each other. And
yet this Shrine as we have made it is a thing of guilt, and it has
brought us all, you and I, and Harry, and the Flopper to a new life."

She lay still for a moment in his arms--then her hand crept up and
touched his forehead and smoothed back his hair.

"I do not quite know how to say it," she said a little timidly. "When
you went away this afternoon, the Patriarch took me back into his room,
and--and I knelt at his knees--and after a little while my mind seemed
very calm and quiet--do you know what I mean? And I tried to think
things out--and understand. And it seemed to come to me that there was a
shrine everywhere if we would only look for it--that God has put a
shrine in every heart, only we are so blind--that every one can make
their own surroundings beautiful and good and true, no matter where they
are, or how poor, or how rich--and if they live like that they must be
good and true themselves."

"Yes," he said slowly; then, after a moment: "And faith too is very much
like that."

"Only some need a sign," she said.

There was silence again, while her hand crept over his face and back to
his forehead to smooth his hair once more--and then very gently she
slipped out of his arms.

"What are we to do about--about everything here?" she asked soberly. "We
are forgetting that in our own happiness. How are we going to return the
money that we have taken?"

"I don't know yet," he answered. "I haven't thought much about it--but
we'll manage somehow."

She shook her head.

"I've thought a great deal about it since yesterday--and I'm not so sure
it is to be 'managed somehow'--and the more I've thought the more
tangled and complicated it has become."

"Well, we'll untangle it to-morrow," said Madison, with a smile, "and--"

"No"--she touched his sleeve. "To-night. Let us do it now--to-night. I
should be so happy then."

He smiled at her again, and drew her to him.

"But we ought to have Pale Face and the Flopper too, don't you think
so?" he said.

"Of course," she said; "and so we will. The Flopper is here, and we can
send him for Harry. It's early yet--not ten o'clock."

"All right," said Madison; "if you wish it. We'll go in then and get the
Flopper."

And so they walked to the cottage door, and into the porch--but in the
porch Madison held her for a moment, and lifted up her face again and
looked into her eyes.

"My--wife," he whispered--and took her in his arms.

--XXIII--

THE WAY OUT

Strange scene indeed! Strange antithesis to that other night when these
four were gathered in that crime-reeked, sordid room at the Roost--where
Pale Face Harry, gaunt, emaciated, coughed, and, trembling, plunged a
morphine needle in his arm; where the Flopper, a wretched tatterdemalion
from the gutter, licked greedy lips and gloated in his rascality; where
Helena, flushed-faced, inhaled her interminable cigarettes and dangled
her legs from the table edge; where Madison, suave, flippant, so certain
of his own infallibility, glorying in his crooked masterpiece, laid the
tribute to genius at his own feet!

Strange scene! Strange antithesis indeed! It was quiet here--very
still--only the distant, muffled boom of the pounding surf. And the
shrine-room, for the first time since its creation, was locked against
the night. It lay now in shadow from the single lamp upon the table--and
the light, where it fell in a shortened circle, for the lamp itself had
a little green paper shade, was soft, subdued and mellow.

Where he had been wont to sit in the days gone by, the Patriarch sat now
in his armchair by the empty fireplace--in the shadow--his head turned
in his strange, listening, attentive way toward the table--toward the
four who were grouped around it. There had been no one to stay with him
in his own room, and so Helena had brought him there--to play his silent
part.

At the table, Pale Face Harry, bronzed and rugged, clear-eyed, a robust
figure from his clean living, his months of the out-of-doors, traced the
grain of the wood on the table mechanically with his finger nail, his
face sober, perplexed; while the Flopper, clear-eyed too, his face
almost a handsome one in its bright alertness, now that it had rounded
out and the hard, premature lines were gone, mirrored Pale Face Harry's
perturbed expression, his eyes fixed anxiously on Madison opposite him;
and Helena, sitting beside Madison, was very quiet, her forehead
wrinkled and pursed up into little furrows, the brown eyes with a hint
of dismay and consternation lurking in their depths, one hand stretched
out to lay quite unconsciously on Madison's sleeve--and from the sleeve
to steal occasionally into Madison's hand.

Madison, his lips tight, pushed back his chair suddenly--they had been
sitting there an hour.

"You were right, Helena," he said, with a nervous laugh. "The more you
try to figure it out the worse it gets."

"Aw, say, Doc," pleaded the Flopper desperately, "don't youse give it
up--youse have got de head--youse ain't never left us in a hole yet."

Madison looked at him, and smiled mirthlessly.

"My head!" he exclaimed bitterly. "I got you into this, all of you--but
it will take more than my head to get you out. If I could stand for it
myself, I'd do it--but I can't without dragging you in too--we're too
intimately mixed up. If I said it was a deal of mine--they'd ask where
Helena came from--they'd ask where you came from, Flopper. We're
beaten--beaten every way we turn. The game has got us--we haven't a
move. We played it to the limit, the slickest swindle that was ever
worked, and it worked till there's more money than I've tried to count.
And then it changed us from thieves, from--from anything you like--and
now that we want to quit, now that we want a chance to make good, it's
got us in its grip and we can't get away." He flirted a bead of moisture
from his forehead. "My God, I don't know what to do!" he muttered
hoarsely. "It was easy enough to _talk_ about stopping this thing, about
returning the money--but I can't see the way out."

No one answered him--all were silent--as silent as the mute and
venerable figure that sat, listening attentively it seemed, in the
armchair by the fireplace.

Madison turned abruptly after a moment to Pale Face Harry.

"You, Harry," he said, laying a hand on the other's shoulder, "you're
the only one of the four that can walk out of it--you don't show in the
center of the stage--you go. You said the old folks would cry over
you--twenty years is a long time to stay away from the old folks--I--I
never knew mine. You go on back to the little farm out there in the West
where you said you'd like to go, and--and give the old people a hand for
the years they've got left."

Pale Face Harry shook his head.

"God knows I'd like to," he said, choking a little; "that's what I
counted on. God knows I'd like to go out there and lead a decent
life--but I don't go that way--I don't crawl out and leave you--what's
coming to you is coming to me."

"That won't help us any, Harry," said Madison softly, and his hand
tightened in an eloquent pressure on Pale Face Harry's shoulder. "You
go--and God bless you!"

Again Pale Face Harry shook his head.

"No," he said. "I stick. If the game's got you, it's got me too--to the
limit. There's no use talking about that."

The Flopper licked his lips miserably.

"Swipe me!" he mumbled. "Hell wasn't never like dis! Me an' Mamie we've
got it fixed, an' her old man says he'll take me inter de store. Say,
Doc, say--ain't dere a chanst ter live straight now we wants ter?"

But Madison did not hear the Flopper save in a vague, inconsequential
way--he was looking at Helena. She had drooped forward a little over the
table, her chin in her hands, her lips quivering--and a white misery in
her face seemed to bring a chill, a numbness to his heart. His Hands
clenched, and he began to pace up and down the room.

How buoyantly he had tackled the problem--buoyant in his own
emancipation, buoyant in his love, in the future full of dreams, full of
inspiration, full of the new life that Helena and he would live
together! How confidently he had settled himself to undo in a moment the
work of months, to outline a mere matter of detail, with never a thought
that he was face to face with a problem that he could never solve--that
brought him to the realization that the game, not he, was the master
still, iron-handed, implacable--that though the mental chains were
loosed it was but as if, in ironic justice, in grim punishment, only
that he might look, clear-visioned, upon the ignominy of the physical
shackles he himself had forged and fashioned so readily, whose breaking
now was beyond his strength.

He had done his work well! In the first few moments, an hour ago, when
he had begun to consider the problem, as seeming difficulties arose, he
had turned coolly from one alternative to another. And then slowly a
sickening sense of the truth had begun to dawn upon him--and like a man
lost in a great forest, peril around him, he had plunged then
desperately in this direction and in that, as a glimmering point of
light here or there had seemed to promise an avenue of escape--only to
find it vanish at almost the first step, the way closed as by some
invisible, remorseless power. No, not invisible--it seemed to take the
form of the Patriarch--for at every turn the majestic figure stood and
would not let him pass.

Madison's face was gray now as he walked up and down the room--there was
his own revulsion, his abhorrence at the part he had played, a frantic,
honorable eagerness to be rid of it; there were these others too who
looked to him, the Flopper and Pale Face Harry; and there was--Helena!
He did not dare to look at the misery in her face again--he was unmanned
enough now.

And then Helena spoke.

"It--it seems," she said, in a low broken way, "as if--as if God did not
want to pardon us--as if our repentance had come too late, and that
there was no Eleventh Hour for us." Then, in passionate pleading, facing
Madison: "God cannot mean that--it is we who cannot see. There is some
way out--there must be--there _must_ be."

"It begins and ends with the Patriarch," said Madison monotonously. "We
can't sacrifice him--can we! What's the use of going over it again? It
all comes back to the same point--the Patriarch."

"Yes, yes; I know, I know," she said piteously. "But think,
Doc--_think_! See now, we just send back all the money and jewels--we
know to whom they belong."

"Well, what reason do we give?" Madison said heavily. "The Patriarch is
alive and well. The immediate corollary is that from the moment we do
that, to-morrow morning for instance, every gift, every offering here is
suddenly refused. What reason do we give? If it were only the donors who
were to be considered it might be done. It's human nature that
ninety-nine out of every hundred of them"--his voice rose a little
bitterly--"would probably be only too glad to get their money back--and
the mere statement that you, as the Patriarch's grand-niece, his only
relative, on mature thought did not consider the project as planned
advisable might suffice. But this thing goes beyond that, beyond even
the remaining few who are earnestly interested and would cause us
trouble--it is world-wide in its publicity! Every newspaper in the land
would snatch at it for a headline, and ask--why? And they would not be
content with simply asking why--this thing is too big for that--too much
before the people's eyes--too good 'copy.' They'd start in to find
out--and the result is inevitable. Our safety so far has lain in the
fact that there has been no suspicion aroused; but snooping around a
bank vault at midnight with a mask on and a bull's-eye lantern fades to
a whisper as a suspicion-arouser compared with anybody willingly
coughing up a bunch of money once they've got their claws on it--and a
yellow journal, let alone an army corps of them, on the scent of a
possible sensation has all the detective bureaus in the country pinned
to the ropes--they'd have us uncovered quicker than I like to think
about it--and that means--"

He stopped, and with a hurried motion, carried his hands across his
eyes--Helena, pure as one of God's own angels now, to come to that, to
come to--

It was the Flopper who completed the sentence.

"Ten spaces up de river," said the Flopper, and shivered, and his tongue
sought his lips; "or mabbe--mabbe twenty."

Pale Face Harry stirred uneasily.

"There's the other way," he said without looking up, his eyes on his
finger nail that traced the grain of the wood again. "Get the money and
the sparklers all done up and addressed to the ones they came from, send
'em off in a bunch to Thornton--and we fly the coop before he gets them,
disappear, fade away--and take our chances of getting caught."

"An' den it's all off wid me an' Mamie"--the Flopper's face grew hard.
"Nix on dat! Dat don't go!"

"We cannot do that, Harry," said Helena, in a tired voice. "There
is--the Patriarch."

"Yes," said Madison, beginning his stride up and down the room again.
"After all, whether we could give back the money without being caught,
or whether we couldn't, is not the vital thing; there is--the
Patriarch."

Helena's eyes were on the silent figure in the shadows by the fireplace.

"If--if it were not for him," she said, "I think that perhaps--perhaps I
might be brave enough to confess it all, and--and not try to escape
from the punishment that I deserve. But he would know--he cannot see,
nor hear, nor speak, but he would know--as he seems so strangely, so
wonderfully, so supernaturally to know and understand everything. And,
oh, he means so much to me, to us all, for it is he, more than any one
else, who has saved us from--from what we were. And he loves us. It
would shatter his faith, ruin all that his life has meant to him,
and--and we cannot bring him grief and sorrow like that. Oh, what can we
do! What _can_ we do! We cannot stop--and we cannot go on! We cannot
stay here even if we returned the money successfully, and we cannot stay
here if we kept it as it is; for things would still have to go on as
they are, even if we didn't mean to steal any more, no matter what we
might say or do, for it's beyond our control now, and to stay means that
we should still have to live and lead our double lives, still have to
practise hypocrisy and deceit, and--and I cannot--we cannot do that any
more. And the only way to get away from it all is to run away--and we
can't do that, either! There is--the Patriarch. We cannot leave him--to
break his heart--with none he loves to care for him. We can't do that.
He is a very old, old man, and--and I think he has been happy with us,
and--and we must make him happy always as long as he lives. We cannot go
away and leave him. We can't do that." Then, in a heartbroken,
despairing cry: "We can't do--_anything_!"

No one answered her. She had begged Madison to go over it all again--and
she had summed it up herself. There was--the Patriarch.

There was utter silence in the room now, save only for that low, solemn
boom of distant surf--for Madison had stopped his nervous pacing up and
down, and stood now by the Patriarch's armchair gazing into the
fireplace.

The minutes passed, and the silence in that dim, shadowed room grew
tense--and tenser still--until the very shadows themselves, as the lamp
flickered now and then, seemed to creep and shift and readjust
themselves in stealth. No sound--no movement--utter stillness--only,
from without, the mourning of the surf, like a dirge now.

And then, with a sudden sob, Helena flung out her arms across the table
toward the Patriarch.

"Oh, if he could only speak!" she cried pitifully. "If he could only
speak--he would show us the way out."

The words seemed to come to Madison as an added pang. He turned his eyes
instinctively from the fireplace to the Patriarch beside him--and then,
a moment, as a man stricken, he stood there--and then reaching quickly
for the lamp from the table he held it up, and leaned forward toward the
figure in the chair.

Helena, startled at the act, rose almost unconsciously to her feet, her
hands holding tightly to the table edge--looking at Madison, looking at
the silent form where Pale Face Harry, where the Flopper looked.

"What is it?" she asked tensely, under her breath.

Madison's lips moved--silently. His face was white, ashen--there was no
color in it. Then his lips moved once more.

"The way out," he said; and again, in a low, awed way: "_The way out_.
We can make restitution now--we can give it all back--he _has_ shown us
the way out."

Helena's lips were quivering, tears were dimming the brown eyes,
trembling on the lashes, as she stepped now to Madison's side.

"It is God who has shown us the way out," she whispered brokenly--and
dropping down before the chair, her little form shaken with sobs, she
hid her face on the Patriarch's knees.

And serene and peaceful as a child in sleep, a smile like a benediction
on the saintly face, the Patriarch sat in his armchair by the fireplace
where he had been wont to sit in years gone by--and so he had passed on.

The Patriarch was dead.

--XXIV--

VALE!

The years have passed--but in their passing have brought few changes to
the little village nestling in the Maine pines that border on the sea.
Not many changes--it is as though Time had touched it loath to touch at
all; as though some spirit lingering there, sweet and fresh and vernal,
had bade Time stay its hand.

Not many changes--the same familiar faces gather around the stove in the
hotel office; and, neither as a memory, nor yet as of one who has gone,
but as if he were amongst them, living still, they speak of the
Patriarch as of yore.

And with this little circle of kindly, simple folk Time has dealt gently
too, for there is only one who is no more--Cale Rodgers, the proprietor
of the general store.

But the general store on the village street still flourishes, and in
Cale Rodgers' place is one whose speech is still a marvelous thing in
staid old New England ears--it is an Irish brogue perhaps, for his name
is Michael Coogan. There are little Coogans too, and Mamie is a happy
wife. And to the Coogans come sometimes letters from a far-western farm
to say that things are well and that prosperity has come to one who
signs himself--facetiously it always seems to Mamie who reads the
letters to her husband--as Pale Face Harry.

And so the years have passed, and it is summer time again. The fields
are green; the trees in leaf; the flowers in bloom. And there are
visitors who have come again to the scenes of yesterday--a man and
woman--and between them a sturdy little lad of eight. They stop at the
end of the wagon track and look out across the lawn.

It is still and peaceful, tranquil--and to them conies the soft, low
murmur of the surf. Slowly they walk across the lawn, and pass beneath
the splendid maples--and pause again.

The cottage is like some poet's fancy, hidden shyly in its creepers and
its vines; and seems to speak and breathe in its simple beauty of the
gentle soul who once had lived there--and loved his fellow-men. It is as
it always was, open, free for all to pass within who wish to enter; for
loving hands have cared for it, and grateful purses, opened to its
needs, have kept it as--a Shrine.

But they do not enter now, for Madison points to where the sunlight, as
it glints through the trees at the far end of the cottage, falls on a
slender shaft of marble.

"Let us go there, Helena," he said softly.

And so they walked that way, past the trellises laden with flowers,
past the end of the cottage; and presently they stopped again where,
beneath the maples' shade, rises the pure white stone--and beyond it is
the sweep of the eternal sea.

Madison, his hair streaking just a little gray at the temples now,
removed his hat--and his face softened, saddened, as he read the simple
inscription:

THE PATRIARCH

The boy glanced at his father a little wonderingly--and then spelt out
the words. He shook his head.

"I don't know what that means," he said. "What does that word mean?"

Madison patted his head.

"You tell him, Helena," he said--and came and stood beside her.

And so Helena told the boy in simple language as much of the Patriarch's
story as she thought he could understand--and when she had finished the
boy's face was aglow.

"And!" he said breathlessly, "and--and did he ever do a really,
truly-truly miracle?"

There was silence for an instant--then a tender smile came trembling to
Helena's lips, and into the brown eyes crept the love-light, as she
reached out to Madison and her hand found his and held it very tightly.

And Madison bent and kissed her; and drew the little lad between them
and laid his hand on the boy's head, and answered for Helena.

"Yes, my son," he said; "and some day when you are a man you will
understand how great a miracle it was."

THE END

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