The gazer turned from the words, with quick question, to the mound. He came close, and in the fading light looked at the name on the low headstone. So he had come too late!
_And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son._ Though for him there could have been no robe or ring, or fatted calf or merriment, yet he had longed for the dearer boon of confession and understanding. If he could only have learned the truth earlier! If he might only put back the hands of the clock!
Hours went by. The shadows dreamed themselves away and dark fell, cloudless and starry. The half-moon brightened upon him sitting moveless beside the stone figure. At length he rose to his feet, his limbs cramped and stiffened, and made his way back to the lonely cabin on the hillside.
There he found fuel, kindled a blaze in the fireplace and cooked his frugal supper. The shock of surprise past, he realized his sorrow as a thing subjective and cerebral. The dead man had been his father; so he told himself, but with an emotion curiously destitute of primitive feeling. The very relationship was a portion of that past that he could never grasp; all that was of the present was Jessica!
He thought of the losing battle he had fought there once before, when tempest shrieked without--the battle which had ended in _débacle_ and defeat. He thought of the will he had seen, now sealed with the Great Seal of Death. He was the shorn beggar, she the beneficiary. What duty she had owed his father was ended now. Desolate she might be--in need of a hand to guide and guard--but she was beyond the reach of penury. This gave him a sense of satisfaction. Was she there on the mountain at that moment? There came upon him again the passionate longing that had held him in that misty sanatorium room when the odor of the jasmin had wreathed them both--when she had protected and saved him!
At last he took Old Despair's battered violin from the wall, and, seating himself in the open doorway, looking across the mysterious purple of the gulches to the skyline sown with pale stars, drew the bow softly across the strings. In the long-past days, when he had been the Reverend Henry Sanderson, in the darker moods of his study, he had been used to seek the relief to which he now turned. Never but once since then had he played with utter oblivion of self. Now his struggle and longing crept into the music. The ghosts that haunted him clustered together in the obscurity of the night, and stood between his opening future and her.