The Forged Note. Micheaux Oscar

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      CHAPTER FOUR

       AND HE NEVER KNEW

       Table of Contents

      Weeks had passed. Mildred Latham could be seen sitting dejectedly by the window of her small bed-room, gazing down a street that led to the river. Every day since that next day when she had been told that a man had called to see her, and instinct told her it was Sidney Wyeth, she had sat thus. On this day, however, things were different. There had been a change—a great change in her life; for she was today, and henceforth, free, in a sense, but this is further along in the story.

      Presently she picked up The Tempest. This was nothing unusual. Although she had read it in two days after she had received it, she had, in the weeks that had just passed, picked it up and reread certain parts of it. But, as a change had come since the last time she held it, she read it today with unusual interest. After reading for a few minutes, she laid it aside, took from the table near a map of South Dakota, and for a time studied the part of it across which was written The Rosebud Country. She allowed her mind to wander meditatively back to the past. She saw this land as it was when the country was young; when the bison and the native Indian held sway; when mighty herds roamed across those plains, molested little by the red man. She picked up the book and read a little more. For scores of years they had lived and died, and at the end of this regime, came the inevitable white man, the greatest race of conquerors the world has ever known, without doubt. And behold the change of a few short years! Nature in wild profusion, then materialism in the extreme. They, these conquerors, had almost changed the world. And among those thousands that crossed the densely settled prairies, and made conquest of The Rosebud Country, were only a few black men. Judging from this book, they could be counted upon the fingers of one hand. One of these was Sidney Wyeth.

      Yes, he had gone forth, hopeful and happy and gay, and had become a Negro pioneer. So he began, and did a man's part in the development of that now wonderful country. Thus she imagined it, and felt it must have been. It could not have been otherwise, because only men went west, to the wild and undeveloped—and stayed. He had stayed for ten years. How he spent those years, Mildred Latham could imagine. Through the pages of that narrative, she had followed his fortunes to the climax—the culmination of a base intrigue. What a glorious feeling it must be, she felt, to be a pioneer; to blaze the way for others, that human beings ever after, to the end of time, may live and thrive by the right of others' conquest! He had plowed the soil, turned hundreds of acres of that wild land into a state of plant productivity, which should bear fruit for posterity. And if Sidney Wyeth had in the end failed, in a way it was only after he had done a man's part in behalf of others.

      But then came the evil.

      In the lives of all men, the greatest thing is to love. Sidney Wyeth had hoped, at some time, to gain this happiness, the love of a woman. Had he earned it? Apparently not, from another's point of view. That was all so singular, she thought, time and again. For the evil creature, evil genius, was a preacher, a minister of the Gospel. "I can't quite reconcile myself to that part of it, yet I should," she mused, now aloud, "for my father is a preacher."

      Mildred Latham's thoughts drifted from Sidney Wyeth for a time, and reverted to her own life, and that of her father, who was a preacher. Soon, they wandered back to Sidney, to his life of Hell—the work of an evil power—the torn soul upon its rack of torture—and finally the anguish—always the anguish, followed by the dead calm of endless existence.

      Yet during their acquaintance, he never spoke of the past. No word of censure, or of unmanly criticism, passed his lips.

      So Mildred Latham could feel in a measure relieved, for she had secrets,—and she kept them all to herself, too.

      Directly, she shook off the depression, and rose to her feet.

      "It is all settled," she said half aloud, and, going to her trunk, laid the book in the tray, lifted the latter out, and, reaching to the bottom, took up a small steel box and set it on the dresser. She then inserted a small key, opened it, and took therefrom a heavy, legal document. Examining it for a time, she put it into her hand bag, locked the box, returned it to its place, replaced the tray and locked the trunk again. This done, she slipped into a street suit, and, gathering up the handbag firmly, left her room, locked the door, stepped into the street, and caught a car that took her up town, where she alighted before a mammoth office building. She entered this, took an elevator and got off on the twentieth floor, entering the office of a prominent law firm. This visit had been pre-arranged.

      An hour later, she left a large bank on the ground floor, returned to her room, took the box from her trunk, and replaced, not the legal document, but a long, green slip of paper.

      "All is now settled on that score," she whispered drearily, and then busied herself mechanically about the room. Again she fell into that fit of meditation. She could not—try as she might—shake off the despondency. And always, in the background somewhere, lurked Sidney Wyeth. Was this because she felt she would never see him again? She couldn't, she knew, as she recalled her secret.

      Suddenly she threw herself weakly across the bed, and sobbed for hours. "Sidney, my Sidney," a careful listener might have heard her lips murmur. But she was alone. Perhaps that made it so hard, for she was alone now, always alone.

      At last she got up and bathed her face, as she had done many times before.

      Always, too, she had a presentiment down in her heart, that somewhere or somehow, some day fate would be kind and send him again into her life. And then would she be ready?

      O that persistent question!

      Now Mildred Latham was not a weak woman. Far from it. In spite of the secret, which was ever her burden, she was not the kind to give up without struggle. This was perhaps the cause, in a degree, of the suffering she endured. It was this sorrow which Sidney Wyeth had observed, and wished to dispell. "If I could only have permitted him to do so," she said, so many, many times. But always The Barrier.

      "I will sell his book henceforth for my living," she said to herself at the end of that day, as she had often said before. "And in doing that, I shall ever live with his memory—God bless him!" For Mildred Latham loved Sidney Wyeth.

      And he never knew.