To stake everything on a single throw of the dice,--and the dice loaded against him! If peace had its victories no less than war, it had also crushing defeats. Hollister felt that for him the final, most complete _débacle_ was at hand.
He lifted his head at a distant call, a high, clear, sweet "Oh-_hoo-oo-oo_" repeated twice. That was Doris calling him as she always called him, if she wanted him and thought he was within range of her voice. Well, he would go down presently.
He looked up the hill. He could see through a fringe of green timber to a place where the leaves and foliage were all rusty-red from the scorching of the fire. Past that opened the burned ground,--charred, black, desolate. Presently life would be like that to him; all the years that stretched ahead of him might be as barren as that black waste.
His mind projected itself into the future from every possible angle. He did not belittle Doris' love, her sympathy, her understanding. He even conceded that no matter how his disfigurement affected her, she would try to put that behind her, she would make an effort to cling to him. And Hollister could see the deadly impact of his grotesque features upon her delicate sensibility, day after day, month after month, until she could no longer endure it, or him. She loved the beautiful too well, perfection of line and form and color. Restored sight must alter her world; her conception of him must become transformed. The magic of the unseen would lose its glamor. All that he meant to her as a man, a lover, a husband, must be stripped bare of the kindly illusion that blindness had wrapped him in. Even if she did not shrink in amazed reluctance at first sight, she must soon cease to have for him any keener emotion than a tolerant pity. And Hollister did not want that. He would not take it as a gift--not from Doris; he could not.
Love, home, all that sweet companionship which he had gained, the curious man-pride he had in that morsel of humanity that was his son,--he wondered if he were to see all these slowly or swiftly withdrawn from him?
Well, he would soon know. He stood up and looked far along the valley. Suddenly it seemed a malevolent place, oppressive, threatening, grim in spite of its beauty. It seemed as if something had been lurking there ready to strike. The fire had swept away his timber. In that brilliant sunshine, amid all that beauty, Myra's life had been snuffed out like a blown candle flame--to no purpose. Or was there some purpose in it all? Was some sentient force chastening him, scourging him with rods for the good of his soul? Was it for some such inscrutable purpose that men died by the hundred thousand in Europe? Was that why Doris Cleveland had been deprived of her sight? Why Myra had been torn by contradictory passions during her troubled life and had perished at last, a victim of passions that burst control? All this evil that some hidden good might accrue? Hollister bared his teeth in defiance of such a conclusion. But he was in a mood to defy either gods or devils. In that mood he saw the Toba valley, the whole earth, as a sinister place,--a place where beauty was a mockery, where impassive silence was merely the threatening hush before some elemental fury. This serene, indifferent beauty was hateful to him in that moment, the Promethean rock to which circumstance had chained him to suffer. It needed only as a capsheaf the gleam of incredulous dismay which should appear in his wife's eyes when she looked first upon the mutilated tissue, the varying scars and cicatrices, the twisted mask that would be revealed to her as the face of her husband.